The Silk Road Ruin Database integrates and publishes various information on archaeological sites in the Silk Road region, ranging from the reports of Silk Road expeditions in the early 20th century to recent Chinese excavation reports. However, it has been challenging to integrate information about ruins across reports due to various problems such as errors in maps, variation or temporal change of place names, and differences in the coverage of the ruin.
Therefore, the Digital Silk Road Project has proposed a methodology of "digital criticism" that includes methods of estimating errors in old maps and identifying archaeological sites through the integration of various information on Silk Road archaeological sites to provide a bird's-eye view of the ruins in the area. We have already released websites such as Gazetteers of the Silk Road, and published several papers that describe our results, and international joint research based on these results has begun.
However, we have not published some research results yet, because the evidence describing how we collated the ruins has too much detail and does not fit well into the form of a paper. Therefore, we designed a new type of database that shares collation evidence by a unit of a card to increase the reproducibility of research so that we can provide not only the results but also the processes of the integration of ruins [more..].
