Representing knowledge in archaeology: from cataloguing cards to Semantic Web

The web has been a "cultural revolution", because information is available everywhere, and users feel the need to combine different sources of knowledge. This semantic interoperability issue is often dealt with by adopting a metadata based approach (Dublin Core is the most popular). However, the metadata approach has the intrinsic limit that metadata are properties we "predicate" about items they refer to, and it is dif?cult, if not impossible, to derive new knowledge from the old. The Semantic Web perspective is much more ambitious, as the aim is to represent, export and share knowledge in a "machine understandable" way, and to allow intelligent agents to reason about it. In this light, scholars' knowledge must be formalized and made explicit as ontology, and very probably we will have to agree on a different model to represent objects, in a distributed and multicultural environment. This is not the end of the traditional scholars' knowledge, but a more effective environment for making this knowledge available to all users.