Advanced Use

Resources Models

Resource Models

Resources Models (RM), or graphs, are the models of any kind of resources. Like molds, they are not perfect but allow copies to be shared. RMs are CIDOC-CRM-based, with nodes connected to other nodes through directed edges (entities and properties).

List

All current EAMENA RMs are hosted here on GitHub

Heritage Places

Field description, Entity-Relationship Diagram

 

Fields

Heritage Places (HP) comprises 98 fields, of which some are mandatory, as indicated in the 'is MDS' column. Minimum Data Standards (MDS) help facilitate comparisons among HP by providing a common basis of populated fields. The table below provides a brief description of these fields, color-coded according to their categories. To explore permissible values for these fields, click the 'values' link. For assistance with a specific field, click the 'issue' link to pose a question or to check if your query has already been addressed.

 

https://eamena-project.github.io/eamena-arches-dev/dbs/database.eamena/data/reference_data/rm/hp/mds/fields-description.html

Field descriptions for Heritage Places, including links to GitHub issues and fields color-coded by category: Assessment Summary, Resource Summary, Geometries, Geography, Archaeological Assessment, Condition Assessment, Environment Assessment, Access (original image, see: fields-description.html, see also: mds-reference.html)

 
  • Structured data: Consist of controlled vocabularies, with possible values detailed in the Bulk Upload (BU) template.
  • Free text: Includes both strings and numerical values.
  • Dates: Follow the ISO 8601 format (YYYY-MM-DD) for precision and standardization.
  • EDTF: Adheres to the ISO 8601-2:2019 format, which allows for both fuzzy dates (to express uncertainty) and very precise timestamps (including hours and minutes).
  • Boolean: Values represent binary choices such as yes/no or presence/absence.
  • Resource instances: Are unique identifiers of related instances derived from another resource model (such as Information Resources, Grid Squares, etc.).
  • GeoJSON feature collections: Include geographical coordinates and geometry types, which may be numerous and varied.

Groups of fields with the link to possible values and value descriptions (in TSV files):

Screenshot of the Heritage Place creation card in the database, showing main node groups on the left and the corresponding HTML dynamic/interactive table 'field-to-tsv.html' on the right, featuring color-coded groups and hyperlinks to individual reference sheets.

Entity-Relationship Diagram

Entity-Relationship Diagram (ERD) is the graphical representation of Heritages fields (CIDOC-CRM entities) and their relationships (CIDOC-CRM properties) to each other, that is to say the Heritage Place resource model

 

ERD of the EAMENA Heritage Place Resource Model with fieldnames (nodes) colored according to the minimum data standard (MDS): Assessment Summary, Resource Summary, Geometries, Geography, Archaeological Assessment, Condition Assessment, Environment Assessment, Access (original image: https://eamena-project.github.io/eamena-arches-dev/dbs/database.eamena/data/reference_data/rm/hp/erd/EAMENA-erd.html)

 

Grid Squares

Grid Squares are 0.25 degrees in both longitude and latitude, covering the entire geographical scope of the EAMENA project, which spans the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region from Afghanistan to Mauritania.

EAMENA geographical scope (Grid Squares perimeter, original image: https://eamena-project.github.io/dbs/database.eamena/data/reference_data/grids/html/EAMENA_Grid_contour.html)
Fields

With the current GeoJSON specification (RFC 7946) to encode geographical data1, the unique EAMENA specific field is 'Grid ID', the reference and unique number of the Grid Square (ex: E61N30-32).

  1. By default, GeoJSON uses the World Geodetic System 1984 (WGS 84) coordinate reference system, and the coordinate reference system for GeoJSON is assumed to be WGS 84 unless specified otherwise.↩