The deep end of the FAIR principles, making documentation from archaeological excavations in Sweden interoperable and reusable through Swedigarch

The Swedish National Infrastructure for Digital Archaeology, Swedigarch, is a federated infrastructure that combines data from different resources, including environmental data, finds, 3D models and GIS data. GIS data is managed in the AGES database, where existing data from excavations are made findable and accessible in open formats. To make the information truly interoperable and reusable, there would be great benefits if data was standardised already from the creation as part of field work. This would include the use of open formats, specified data structure, controlled vocabularies and resolvable identifiers. Through a few projects, we have started to develop these standards, with the aim of making the data FAIR, without infringing on the archaeological workflow and interpretations in the field. These principles are now put to the test as they will be further developed and applied as part of the Ostlänken railroad excavations, the largest archaeological project in Sweden to date. A formal requirement as part of these excavations is that data will be made available after the excavations, something that has for a long time been prescribed, but not the practice. I will present how we have been approaching this work in Sweden, how far we have come, what solutions has worked for us and what challenges remains to be solved, with the hope that several aspects of our work also could be applied in other contexts.