ArcheoFOSS 2022
SITAR - Sistema Informativo Territoriale Archeologico di Roma APIs and Open Data services for a new archaeological data-sharing policy

Panel: I/O: ethics, policies and technologies for programmatic and open access to archaeological online data sets

The action of the Public Administration in Italy is increasingly influenced by the growing and pervasive presence of digital technology and its rapid developments. The omnipresence of (structured) data, databases and platforms and the interconnection between them are profoundly transforming the way the Administration operates, which will continue to change in the future.

In the next months, the Cultural Heritage sector will witness a rapid acceleration by virtue of the implementation of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP), which pursues — among other things — an organic digitization plan for the Cultural Heritage held in museums, archives, libraries. The stated goal is to enable users of all kinds to explore new forms of access to Cultural Heritage and thus ensure full accessibility and transparency of the data produced by the Public Administration, while at the same time safeguarding the guarantees imposed by privacy and copyright laws.

SITAR - Sistema Informativo Territoriale Archeologico di Roma pursues the same aspirations and for more than a decade has been making available archaeological data from the more than 6,000 excavations directed by the Special Superintendency of Rome. Data accessibility is guaranteed at various levels. Thanks to the UI, implememnted with specific functions to export map extracts relating to vector datasets, users can freely download the spatial data distributed with a CC-BY-SA 4.0 license, choosing among the main open formats that best suits their needs. Moreover, SITAR delivers data through WMS and WFS protocols, and it is fully complieant with the main operating standards and regulations defined by the OGC (http://www.opengeospatial.org/docs/is/).

The pressing necessity to establish institutional synergies with other public institutions and projects that produce and implement datasets in the Cultural Heritage sector required a significant effort in terms of interoperability. Thanks to the latest implementation, SITAR provides a series of specific APIs to make REST calls both to the Elastic Search engine and to the REST API component, returning in both cases data in JSON format. SITAR will thus be able to receive data from external sources and to configure and provide services in support of other infrastructure and/or projects based on the same standards of technological interoperability.

License

This text is released under Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 Imternational license.