Summary
Information systems for archaeology are based on the description of discrete entities with well-known attributes and associations. This has led to artificially static views of reality, where stored information provides a temporal snapshot of what reality was like at a given moment, and also an objectivized view, corresponding to the judgment of reality by a particular set of authors. But reality is indeed diachronic and multivocal. Here we propose a mechanism to cope with such ?soft issues? within the sphere of information modelling, based on the determination of which information features are of a temporal or subjective nature, and then using ?object slices? to convey perdurant and multivocal semantics in software. The conceptual modelling language ConML has been provided with the necessary extensions so that the temporal and subjective aspects of archaeological entities can be described.
Keywords
Conceptual modelling. Temporality. Subjectivity. Multivocality. ConML.