Pepadb: Putting the FAIR Principles into Practice

The main interest in the publication of spatial indexed archaeological data is to offer users the possibility of querying, downloading and/or accessing them in external applications. This apps are aimed to model, analyze, display or generate new geospatial data, information and value-added resources, both in the social and economic spheres. Given the extremely high cost of generating geographic information, the reuse of this data by users is highly expected. As the result of not complying with the FAIR EU policy, the already existing spatial indexed archaeological data are not easily accessible and therefore reusable, neither to the public, nor to the academia (Sobotkova, 2018). PEPAdb (Prehistoric Europe’s Personal Adornment) is a multidisciplinary and open research project which has materialized in an SDI (Spatial Data Infrastructure) and a web-app for the online publication of georeferenced archaeological scientific data referring to personal adornment in European Recent Prehistory. It accounts for thousands of records on Prehistoric Personal Adornment from over 900 archaeological sites on the Iberian Peninsula, giving access not only to thematic cartographies, but also to raw data and empirical data sets through an online cartographic viewer, and a database query app. This initiative aims to comply with the FAIR principles, placing special emphasis on data reusability. Data repositories (such as Dataverse, among others) can generate a formal citation for each piece of data according to specific standards, in addition to automatically assigning the DOI (Document Object Identifier) and the so-called persistent identifiers, providing a greater accessibility to (meta)data (Wilkinson, 2016). Referenced cites: Sobotkova, A. (2018). Sociotechnical Obstacles to Archaeological Data Reuse. Advances in Archaeological Practice, 6(02):1-8. DOI: 10.1017/aap.2017.37. Wilkinson, M.D. et al. (2016). The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship. Scientific Data, 3, 160018. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2016.1