Recogito for Mare Nostrum LAB

Archaeological research draws on sources in many forms. A published article may contain the description of a pottery type, an excavation report may document a context, and a photograph or drawing may preserve a detail needed for comparison. Recogito lets a team bring these materials together within research projects and work with them in a web browser.

PDFs and images can be annotated within the same project. Image content can range from excavation photographs and object drawings to maps, charts, publication plates and scanned archival pages. Researchers can attach comments and tags to selected fragments and discuss their interpretation with colleagues.

Annotation does not require every source to have been processed with OCR (optical character recognition). When a PDF has a selectable text layer, researchers can highlight a text segment and annotate it directly. For scanned pages and visual material, area annotations let them identify the relevant region - allowing a drawing, an archival photograph, a table or a passage visible only as an image to become the target of an annotation.

Mare Nostrum LAB extends PDF annotation with rectangular and polygonal selections. These allow researchers to outline both regular and irregular areas on a page, bringing the region-based approach used for images into the PDF workflow independently of whether the page has an OCR text layer.

In a large research team, a reference needs to be precise enough for people from different disciplines to find and assess the same evidence. An annotation provides that point of reference - a particular passage, part of a figure or detail in an image, together with the team's comments and tags. Because annotations are displayed within the original document, they retain the local context of the surrounding text, figures and structure, minimising the risk of misreading isolated fragments.

Recogito provides stable, direct links to individual annotations. Selecting an annotation updates the document address; sharing that address lets an authorised colleague reopen the document with the annotation selected. The same address can be saved as a reference in Arches - for example, linking a pottery record to an annotated illustration or a context record to an excavation report - allowing archaeologists, architects and conservators to refer to shared evidence with the appropriate access permissions.

The Mare Nostrum LAB Thesaurus plugin connects source annotations with the controlled vocabularies used elsewhere in the platform. Researchers can search for a concept and attach it as a tag, linking a selected passage or image region to a defined archaeological term. Search results show the concept's label, dictionary, description and identifier, while project administrators choose which dictionaries are available to match each project's research questions.

The plugin retrieves concepts through SPARQL, a standard language for querying linked data, built directly into the annotation interface so researchers can use selected text as the starting point for a search. A text discussing a vessel form can therefore be tagged with the same Thesaurus concept used to describe archaeological records and spatial datasets, keeping terminology connected through shared identifiers.

Mare Nostrum LAB simplifies document metadata entry by making the 15 Dublin Core elements available in the editing form. Researchers can record information such as title, creator, date, publisher, source, language and rights using a consistent set of fields, with additional custom fields available when needed.

Dublin Core is an established metadata vocabulary for describing resources. Presenting these standard fields together reduces the need to recreate the same metadata structure for each document, helping teams document the provenance of their source material and maintain consistent descriptions across PDFs and images as the collection grows.

Work with source material continues across university offices, remote collaborations and excavation sites, where internet quality can vary. Mare Nostrum LAB has adjusted the PDF viewing configuration with these conditions in mind, making documents display more reliably across connections of different quality to support the practical task of opening, reading and annotating reports in the shared workspace.

Recogito for Mare Nostrum LAB is available to signed-in users, providing a controlled environment for source material that may include unpublished research documentation or restricted publications. Projects can be visible to all registered users of the instance (Public) or limited to authorised participants and administrators (Private), with membership and permissions determining how users work with the material.

This lets teams organise sources around particular sites, research questions or specialist collaborations. Within Mare Nostrum LAB, GeoNode provides the route for openly sharing suitable project datasets and documents, while Recogito supports collaborative source analysis within the authorised community.

Recogito Studio supports the W3C Web Annotation Data Model, which describes an annotation, its content and the source fragment to which it refers, allowing annotations to be exported in a structured format for reuse in compatible tools. Direct annotation links, structured data and references to Thesaurus concepts provide complementary ways to preserve the relationship between a source, its interpretation and the archaeological records that draw on it.

While Recogito Studio supplies the open-source foundation for collaborative annotation, Mare Nostrum LAB builds on it with Thesaurus tagging, a consistent Dublin Core metadata form, PDF viewing adjustments and area annotation tools for PDFs.