ArCOA Digital Archive

ArCOA (Archivi e Collezioni dell'Oriente Antico) is a project launched by the CNR Institute of Heritage Science and the University of Milan. It aims at studying, digitizing and promoting the collections of Near Eastern antiquities and historical archives preserved in Italian museums and other public institutions. The ArCOA Digital Archive was conceived and developed at the CNR-ISPC for the cataloguing of the archaeological objects forming those collections. It consists of a backend using a relational database (based on the open-source DBMS MariaDB) for persistence, a browser-based interface for the synchronous recording and manipulation of data by a distributed workgroup, and a REST API service to expose interoperable data that will be queried by the project's portal. The entire system is based on the open-source PHP Web framework Laravel. The conceptual model of the relational database consists of nine entities for the description of the objects, the collections to which they belong, the collectors who formed them, the institutions where they are currently hosted, the sites of origin of the pieces, the archival documents describing them, their images and 3D models, and the related bibliography.