Resumen
Archaeological knowledge is constructed by making arguments from material evidences. Interpretation, therefore, plays a central role in the archaeological practice, and understanding how it works will help us improve our capacity to value other people’s conclusions, revise our own, and overall produce better results. For this to happen, two aspects must be developed in conjunction. On the one hand, we need robust models of the archaeological record, which allow us to reason about the corresponding physical artefacts. On the other hand, we need to understand how argumentation takes place, and how new knowledge is constructed from smaller pieces. Thus, ontology and discourse must be treated in relation to one another; if we treat ontological issues without argumentation, we only get a static and fossilized view of the world; if we study argumentation without ontology, we only get propositions about unknown entities.Furthermore, a wide array of computational techniques has been used to model, store and process both ontologies and argumentation as separate artefacts, but none exist that can tackle both aspects at the same time.This session aims to address the joint modelling of the archaeological record and the argumentations that occur over it, and the joint processing of the ensuing data.Major research areas that are welcome in the session include the following:• What conceptual models or ontologies of the archaeological record exist, and how useful and robust are they?• What computational conceptual models of the archaeological argumentation processes exist, and how useful and robust are they?• How can we successfully trace interpretative conclusions to the original evidences, and how can this be supported by computational approaches?• How can archaeological conceptual models help us to understand and check the integrity of the associated discourse, and vice versa?• How can archaeological interpretations and argumentations be formally and computationally analysed for a better understanding?• How do archaeological models or ontologies evolve during multi-agent argumentation? How can this temporal dimension be captured in databases, corpora, or other computer tools?• How can we build databases, ontologies, or corpora that support interpretative and argumentative processes over the archaeological record?• What computing techniques, such as data-to-text, data mining or natural language processing, should we use to support multivocal argumentation in archaeology?
Palabras clave
Argumentation. Interpretation. Archaeological record. Conceptual modelling.