ArchCamp 7

CAA 2009: Williamsburg

Intro
Attendees:
 * Leif Isaksen
 * Geoff Avern
 * Chris Renaud
 * Kelly Monteleone
 * Martin Hinz
 * Maximilian Schich
 * Michael Charno
 * Matthias Lang
 * Stephen White
 * Sara Franck
 * Todd Brenningmeyer
 * Adam Rabinowitz
 * Jessica Ogden
 * Bill Wilcox
 * Hugh Corley
 * Cathy Campbell
 * Arianna Traviglia
 * Philip Verhagen

Digital Curation
Michael posed a question about the difficulty of 3D data archiving, and the conversation quickly diverged into a discussion about standards ;)-
 * What file types are being used during capture, and will specific properties of the 3D data be lost when it is 'downgraded' to ascii data format from proprietary formats? Is it possible to 'reverse-engineer' these formatting issues after archiving? Comments were made about separating the 'organization' of the data from the 'grouping' of the data, maintaining the original structure of the data. Parallels were made to other proprietary data formats in archaeological computing, including GIS
 * Metadata curation- mechanized, and manual citations should aid in issues of ?questioning? the origin and 'intentions' surrounding the original data sets. If the original data is lost, these types of metadata are crucial to understanding..
 * Ontologies are key to understanding, sharing, and managing data over multiple years. Ontologies allow for the composition, decomposition, and evolution of the data set. Standards are necessary, but at times, ontologies are sometimes more appropriate. Ontologies are 'step one.'

Intrasis Recording Software
Hugh, from English Heritage presented on the incorporation of Intrasis in archaeological recording. It all begins with the Revelation Project, when English Heritage realized that traditional relational models doesn't meet there archaeological needs which spawned the movement to a 'object oriented' model. Intrasis is the GIS field and office-based system for recording archaeological data. Data is being directly entered into the 'system' from the field producing direct digital recording, moving away from paper based recording of field data, through to post-excavation analysis, dissemenation, and archiving. Intrasis has a Helpdesk, which provides support for internal development, supporting the completion of projects.

Temporal Modeling in Heurist
Cathy Campbell (PhD student at Sydney) is developing an ontology and data model specific to dealing with 'complex relationships,' levels of uncertainties, and the ways in which the data is being displayed chronologically in the Heurist database. Cathy presented some information about the historical ontology schema which was developed to include the 'key components' of the data model, including: viewpoints, temporal data, relationships, events, bibliographic data, entities, and attributes of the entities. This model is an attempt to avoid "concretizing' the data, and changing/breaking the original historical narrations. By defining the dimensions of an event at varying granularities, temporal characteristics can be illustrated visually using probability curves.

Heurist
Stephen presented an introduction to http://acl.arts.usyd.edu.au/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=179&Itemid=208 Heurist]. Database running on MySQL, working towards opensource. Contains a set of tools which allow for the importing of bibliographic and geographic data sets. It separates the data from 'type'- by creating relationships between records. Built a system that is flexible, in order to allow for the evolution of the data. They have created an application to map the geographic records. Developed tools that allow for the manipulation, visualization, and understanding of humanities data. Data is divided upon the import process to reduce redundancy. Not capable of full scale spatial querying.

Open Source WebMapping and Issues of Usability
Todd then presented on MARWP (Minnesota Archaeological Researches in the Western Peloponnesos) which was originally developed in 2005 as a Web Mapping resource. Problems arose with issues of 'usability'- which came to the realization that users of GIS which are not specialists have trouble using webGIS. Turned to Open Layers for more intuitive web mapping tools. Looked to Flash- and Modest Maps.

Modest maps contain libraries for the creation of 'slippy maps'- as compared to the original 2005 maps. Each element/icon is linked to movie clips containing information about the site. The tiles, or background data are being buffered, rather than being sent as WMS layers.

Cool Websites!

 * The mighty GeoNames was demonstrated. GeoNames is a open access community-based server that maintains conceptual places across the world. Each place has information (including alternative toponyms, location, category and related resources) attached to it by RDF. More importantly, it gets a unique URI that can be resolved to an RDF/XML description. It also has a handy Web API that comes in a variety of linguistic flavours. Leif found it extremely useful when writing software that helps archaeologists map their site locations to canonical URIs. He secretly hope that the Heurist gang will do the same for temporal concepts :-)
 * Freebase, a structured data equivalent of Wikipedia - downloadable. Capable of allowing for the building of applications. Graph oriented database. Data is stored in a central cloud, though there is an API, a query language MQL (similar to SPARQL), and monthly dumps of the full database... The interface is awesome. For more info see their introduction. Free!

Survivors
Just before we all piled off to the Green Leif Tavern :-)