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Due to its striking decoration, the so-called African Red Slip Ware (ARS) is central to the understanding of Late Antique imagination. The collaborative project between i3mainz and the RGZM opens up the artefact in an innovative and sustainable way through 3D digitisation. Characteristic of the North African bowls, plates, and jugs are their pictorial decorations applied mainly by appliqués and stamps. As mass-produced image carriers and everyday objects, the ARS spread throughout the empire. The range of motifs includes mythological scenes as well as scenes from the Old and New Testament, circus, arena and hunting scenes as well as fish and plant motifs. The appliqués-decorated pottery thus provides insights into Late Antique imagination and its changes, as well as into the economic history of the period between the 3rd and 5th centuries AD in North Africa. Previous documentation methods were not able to capture the objects and their decoration in an adequate way. The digital recording of the RGZM's collections by 3D scans allows to compare potentially identical appliqués and to assign them to their negative forms and the corresponding stamps. Whereas vessel curvature previously falsified the assignment of appliqués and models, 3D analysis and visualisation tools now allow a comparison . Metadata created for each object increases the effectiveness and accuracy of determining image context and content. Issues related to the production of the ARS and the process flows within the workshops can be investigated through the analysis of the 3D data.

Characteristic of the North African bowls, plates, and jugs are their pictorial decorations applied mainly by appliqués and stamps. As mass-produced image carriers and everyday objects, the ARS spread throughout the empire. The range of motifs includes mythological scenes as well as scenes from the Old and New Testament, circus, arena and hunting scenes as well as fish and plant motifs. The appliqués-decorated pottery thus provides insights into Late Antique imagination and its changes, as well as into the economic history of the period between the 3rd and 5th centuries AD in North Africa. Previous documentation methods were not able to capture the objects and their decoration in an adequate way. The digital recording of the RGZM's collections by 3D scans allows to compare potentially identical appliqués and to assign them to their negative forms and the corresponding stamps. Whereas vessel curvature previously falsified the assignment of appliqués and models, 3D analysis and visualisation tools now allow a comparison . Metadata created for each object increases the effectiveness and accuracy of determining image context and content. Issues related to the production of the ARS and the process flows within the workshops can be investigated through the analysis of the 3D data. The developed ontology uses CIDOC CRM and various extensions. The data mainly consists of objects (E24), on which e.g. applications (features, E25) can be found. These objects can be described semantically, e.g. by the shape or time epoch. Features are described with observations, e.g. a human type man standing and wearing a beard. These observations lead to interpretations whose arguments can be observations.

The African Red Slip Ware (ARS) is a central archaeological object type for the understanding of late antique world of ideas, their exchange and socio-economic history. The 3-year project ARS3D, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), started in February 2018 and aims to document, digitise and publish the relief-decorated ARS, located in the Römisch-Germanischen Zentralmuseum (RGZM). The ARS3D project will publish the facts and archaeological interpretations of these ARS objects. In this process the ARSs are 3D scanned and processed to create their 3D surrogates. These 3D models support archaeological interpretations which should be documented. Here we present our ontology that forms the structural fundament for the documentation and the underlying triplestore as data repository. The axioms are primarily based on CIDOC-CRM with few additions to fulfil our requirements. In addition, we included axioms to provide structure for storing meta- and para- information generated during the creation of 3D models. We have also included axioms from PROV-O, the W3C compliance ontology for structuring the provenance information of the 3D generation process. An interactive web application provides the graphical user interface of this ARS data repository. In this paper we consider data quality aspects for: 1) Provenance quality that affects the archaeological interpretations. 2) Archaeological factual quality on ARSs such as iconographical descriptions by bibliographic references and external resources, e.g. Icon Class to access the LOD cloud. 3) Identifying the provenance and storing chronological information.