XRONOS: An open repository and curation platform for chronometric data

Roe, Joe; Hinz, Martin (11 August 2022). XRONOS: An open repository and curation platform for chronometric data (Unpublished). In: CAA 2022. Oxford. 8.-11.08.2023.

Computational archaeologists have benefited immensely from our field’s recent embrace of open data and open science approaches, and one of the principle domains in which this has been applied in recent years is chronometric data. Comprehensive compilations of radiocarbon dates have become available for many parts of the world in the last decade and, as natural next step, there are now several initiatives to collate this data globally, including the retrieval tool c14bazAAR (Schmid, Seidensticker, and Hinz 2019), the IntChron exchange format (Bronk Ramsey et al. 2019), and the synthetic database p3kc14 (Bird et al. 2022). But this effort is far from complete. Radiocarbon datasets are still sorely lacking for many parts of the world and, even in those regions with good coverage, the quality of data is highly uneven and largely undocumented. There exists no central repository ensuring the long-term sustainability and completeness of these datasets, and the potential of placing other sources of chronometric information (e.g. dendrochronology, typological dating) in an open data framework has hardly been realised at all.
Here, building on and complementing these initiatives, we present XRONOS <https://xronos.ch>: a new web-based platform for chronometric data from archaeological contexts worldwide, combining an open data repository with tools for importing, curating and analysing chronometric information from diverse sources. The principal design goals of the software are to:
1. Combine all available sources of radiocarbon and other chronometric data in single database;
2. Develop robust tools for the continuous ingestion and refinement of this data;
3. Disseminate this data within an open and FAIR framework, embedding it in the wider world of Linked Open Data in archaeology and beyond.
This poster describes the conceptual and technical infrastructure developed to realise these goals in XRONOS’ initial phases (2019 and 2021–2022), including a generalised data model for site and radiocarbon information, extendable to other chronometric data; an R- and Ruby-based pipeline for continuous ingestion of data from a variety of sources; continuous, semi-automated data cleaning protocols; a Ruby-on-Rails application providing a web-based frontend to the data and a REST API for programmatic access; and an R package for interfacing with the API. The XRONOS framework provides more open, more reliable, and more comprehensive access to chronometric data than previously available, as well as a foundation for its continuous expansion and refinement. It is hoped that this will already further the application of quantitative and computational methods to archaeological chronologies and, as an open science and open source project, we warmly encourage colleagues to participate in shaping the future direction of XRONOS.

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