Building an ontology of tablewares using ‘legacy data'

This article aims to demonstrate how an ontology can be constructed to encompass many of the criteria needed for more consumption-oriented approaches to Roman tablewares. For this it demonstrates how a dataset in a relational database can be organised for the format and capabilities of an ontology, and then how these data are input into the ontology model. Finally it includes some sample analyses to show the effectiveness of such an ontology for types of analyses that are relevant to this network.