Accessibility And Openness Of Archaeological Heritage Data In Serbia

Abstract

In the Republic of Serbia there is a several decades long practice of documenting archaeological heritage in digital environment. At present, there is also an obligation of institutions responsible for cultural heritage in Serbia to implement the information system defined by law and to send the data to the state center for further management and long-term preservation. Further on, since the Government of Serbia recognized the importance of re-usage of data kept by its public institutions, it highlighted its strategy for making them publicly available and accessible by issuing a row of laws and regulations. However, in reality, even with these laws and instead of the model of full accessibility and open data usage, institutions of protection in Serbia still choose to apply selective accessibility. Thus, the paper reveals the current state of the art regarding accessibility of cultural heritage data in Serbia in 2022 and questions the possibilities of its usage and re-usage. Two examples of public national repository data re-usage are presented. In the first example, presuming that the data holder guarantees data reliability and also that it shared them on the web in an adequate way and in an adequate form, the authors of this paper tested how a user with a minimum technical knowledge can download them and use them for an individual project. The paper presents how with the help of simple tools, three open data sets of national providers were used for creating digital collections aiming to promote archaeological sites of exceptional importance situated along the National cycling Danube route, this being part of the European cycling route „ЕuroVelo 6”. In the second example, the paper deals with advantages of connecting national data sets about cultural heritage with international knowledge bases aiming for their re- usage and preservation. The paper describes the process of integrating data sets of the Mathematical Institute SANU about more than 150 highly important cultural monuments in Serbia with the ARIADNEplus Portal. The here mentioned cultural monuments were initially described within the suggested national metadata format with the goal to incorporate them more easily during a possible establishing of a national information system for management and preservation of data about cultural heritage. The authors further discuss whether this metadata format respected the basic principles regarding interoperability, modularity, refinement, extensibility, multilingualism and flexibility, in order to make the metadata easily mapped and prepared for integration with the ARIADNEplus Portal.