Digital Humanities Congress 2026

ATRIUM has the pleasure to present a paper ‘Enhancing the ARIADNE Portal through European collaboration’ at the Digital Humanities Congress in Sheffield, UK.

About the Digital Humanities Congress

The Digital Humanities Congress is a conference held in Sheffield every two years. Its purpose is to promote the sharing of knowledge, ideas and techniques within the digital humanities.

The University of Sheffield’s Digital Humanities Institute is delighted to announce that its two-day conference will be held in Sheffield on Wednesday 2nd and Thursday 3rd September 2026.

Digital humanities is understood by Sheffield to mean the use of technology within arts, heritage and humanities research as both a method of inquiry and a means of dissemination. As such, proposals related to all disciplines within the arts, humanities and heritage domains are welcome.

The conference will take place at the University’s refurbished conference facility, The Edge.

Abstract: Enhancing the ARIADNE Portal through European collaboration

By Sarah Middle (presenting), Émilie Pagé-Perron (presenting) and Julian Richards (Archaeology Data Service, University of York)

The ARIADNE RI is a not-for-profit archaeological Research Infrastructure founded in 2022 with more than 30 international member research institutions, including the Archaeology Data Service (UK), the Swedish National Data Service, the Institutes of Archaeology in Czechia (Brno and Prague), the Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas, and many others. Its main service is the ARIADNE Portal, which has been developed for over a decade, with funding from the European Commission. The Portal is the main hub for discovering archaeological and related datasets provided by partners and now curates metadata for more than 4 million records. Recent enhancements to the Portal have been prompted by our involvement in European infrastructure projects, while also providing further-reaching benefits to the wider user community.

Advancing fronTier Research In the arts and hUManities (ATRIUM) is a European Union- funded project with the objective to bridge Research Infrastructures (DARIAH, ARIADNE, CLARIN, and OPERAS). As part of the research, enhancements to the ARIADNE Portal are implemented to improve the findability of archaeological and other disciplines’ datasets for researchers and a wider public, in particular for citizen science practitioners. The main enhancements pertain to AO-Cat, the ontology that drives the organisation of metadata in the portal, and the Portal’s web interface itself. On the ontological front, the two main changes enabled the cataloguing of data types and the handling of new media. On the Portal side, we have seen the implementation of viewers to augment the comprehension of datasets at a glance, with a particular focus on 3D viewers (3D-Hop and Xeokit). Based on user feedback, additional features and enhancements were implemented to improve search and filtering capabilities.

Applying Reactive Twins to Enhance Monument Information Systems (ARTEMIS) is also funded by the European Union, and seeks to apply digital twins to facilitate conservation, engagement and research. A digital twin is an exact digital replica of a physical object, building or site (for example); in ARTEMIS, the Reactive Heritage Digital Twin (RHDT) takes this concept further by enabling responsive decision-making in real-time, based on sensor measurements. RHDTs are underpinned by data about the physical object, obtained through sources such as reports and scholarly publications, and modelled using the ARTEMIS ontology. Part of this work involves the use of open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) to extract relevant terminology from unstructured texts and semantically model the resulting relationships. We are additionally investigating the capability for entering natural language queries and translating them to SPARQL via an LLM, allowing for more nuanced and specialised searching. As the ARTEMIS database uses the same infrastructure as ARIADNE, these developments are planned for future integration with this more persistent resource, beyond the project’s lifespan.

In our presentation, we will start by providing some background information on ARIADNE. We will then present our case studies from ATRIUM and ARTEMIS, as well as demonstrating enhancements that are already available. To close, we will reflect on how such developments have facilitated discoverability and improved the user experience in the ARIADNE Portal, before outlining some of our future plans.