Creating Conceptual Models in Archaeology

International audienceResearch and practice in archaeology often generates and manages a large amount of information that exhibits complex relationships and categorisation phenomena. The quality of the conceptual models that we use when gathering, organising, processing and reporting this information determines to a large extent the quality of the results. Creating explicit, high-quality conceptual models is a crucial task in any information-intensive endeavour, and especially in those where the complexity of the information makes it hard to handle by intuition alone. This workshop aims to introduce the discipline of conceptual modelling, often seen as pertaining to the engineering world, to archaeologists and related professionals. The authors have extensive experience in using conceptual modelling in archaeological domain for over 15 years, and will use CML (Conceptual Modelling Language) as a vehicle. CML is a simple, high-level, affordable, semi-formal, powerful language especifically designed with the humanities in mind. In addition to supporting most of the object-oriented structural modelling constructs, it extends them with concerns that are rarely seen in industry-standard approaches but which are extremely important in archaeology, such as the ability to express temporality and subjectivity in conceptual models. The workshop will assume no previous knowledge of conceptual modelling, although it will assume certain familiarity with archaeological concepts. It will begin by teaching the basic tenets of object-oriented structural modelling, followed by more advanced concepts and situations. An extensive array of exercises and practical cases will be used throughout to engage participants in the actual usage of the modelling language. A number of 20 participants is considered maximum for the workshop. We believe that the theoretical foundations that this workshop would convey to the participants are intensely needed by the community, which tends to focus too much on tools and techniques. We have carried out similar experiences within the LaPa - CSIC with excellent results; archaeologists with no previous exposure to conceptual modelling are capable of creating good quality models after a 2-hour session