Archaeology within the Andalusian Thesaurus of the Historical Heritage 145 ' 2004 - AllInsegna del Giglio s.a.s. - www.edigiglio.it ARCHAEOLOGY WITHIN THE ANDALUSIAN THESAURUS OF THE HISTORICAL HERITAGE (TAPH). DESIGN, IMPLEMENTATION AND COMPUTERISATION 1. BACKGROUND AND ORIGINS OF THE TAPH 1.1 The Andalusian Heritage Information System (SIPHA) The Andalusian Heritage Information System (SIPHA in its Spanish acronym) was first conceived in 1991 by the Andalusian Institute of the His- torical Heritage (IAPH) as the information framework for the protection and management of the regional cultural heritage (LADRÓN DE GUEVARA 1996). Since its inception, this system was designed to integrate data pertaining to a large variety of heritage objects (whether buildings or portable artefacts of archaeological, architectural, artistic or ethnological interest, including their spatial/territorial dimension) as well as documents (bibliographic, photo- graphic, archives etc.). Initially, the SIPHA was developed as a series of “sec- torial” or disciplinary databases dealing with architectural, archaeological and ethnological objects, historical cities as well as bibliographic, documen- tal and graphic information (for a synthesis of the Archaeological Heritage sub-system see FERNÁNDEZ CACHO 2002). At present, the process of integra- tion of all those disciplinary databases within a single computerised data management environment is well under way. This system will soon be net- worked with the general data management system of the regional govern- ment and will be partly accessible through the Internet (MUÑOZ CRUZ 2001). Since the start, it became clear that one of the needs of such integrated heritage information systems would be a documentation language capable of describing the breadth and depth of the information stored in the system databases. Hence, this paper discusses some theoretical and methodological issues involved in the design and construction of that language, the Andalusian thesaurus of historical heritage (TAPH in its Spanish acronym), with a spe- cial emphasis on its archaeological dimension. 1.2 Methodology and structure Traditional documentation tools such as classifications and subject head- ing lists, useful for the purpose of describing bibliographic information, are fairly limited when it comes to the variety of objects and documents dealt with by a heritage information system. Thesauri have become widely used as documentation tools within heritage information systems for three reasons. Archeologia e Calcolatori 15, 2004, 145-160