Christopher Warner "So, it's not like the code is my brain; keep it"

The Archaeology Program

This NPS online course has been invaluable to me in learning more about archaeology. I am by no means an archaeologist but it's extremely appalling to me how much the act of curation is lacking and how little structured data is available. One would believe the acquisition of many data facets would be a complete must have. I am quickly learning that is not so. My personal findings are that there are no shortage of trouble trying to do research on the proper way to manage archaeological data. There is no one true standard or method into data collection.  Suffice to say in my own opinion after about a good 6 weeks of reading is that there should be; part of the problem is I suppose laziness and lack of due diligence out in the field. Obviously, I mean that as no slight to archaeologist in the dirt hunting for treasure. It's truly no small task to properly take the GPS coordinates, name, marker, color, harris matrix data, photographs, etc etc of a dig/site when you have many other things to do; including actually researching whatever has been found. Compounded with the lack of appropriate funding and time constraints it begins to get very difficult. That said, the other side of the coin is then taking that curated data and exposing it in easily accessible public fashion; there is simply no shortage of halfway, broken implementations here that don't fully expose the actual object that we are speaking of.  Most of what I've found is exposing the object for display or conceptually; which while needed for a museum, doesn't actually concentrate solely on the object. In theory curation at the exhibition level I'm finding is more of a on a case by case basis. The specific object and site data should be available in such fashion that any museum curator would be able to pull down whatever specific data they wanted on the find or even just a specific object in a whole find.

So, how does this affect me? Well, I want that data so I can do web semantic "stuff" with it. Actually, I wouldn't be doing all this background research if the data existed in a unified way so I could play with it. I want to mine the data from a specific archaeological site and be able to find relations that I would otherwise not know exist. I then want to make observations on that data, well, actually I don't want to make observations myself. I'll leave that to the serious archaeologist but I would like to be able to make that research possible and play with web data research, based on that. Seeing as I have some of the foremost researchers at my finger tips this will help me immensely. This originally started when I began implementing an ontology content type for Plone which would allow an ontology to be built describing whatever anyone wanted. After reading a couple of thesis papers on changing ontologies and the management problems there. I went further down the rabbit hole and simply hit a wall where I realized I was trying to solve the wrong problem. This can't be the right approach in-fact, that is the problem right now. Everyone is trying to be the "authority" on the conceptual understanding of the data in digital form. Allowing everyone to create their own ontology isn't solving anything. I'm currently rethinking the whole idea. My new approach involves finding a proper solution for a solid foundation of data from a site/dig. To conceptually understand the data is nice but unless you have a solid foundation of data it's inherently pointless. The idea is to leave the understanding to a requisite professional but give them the ability to see the data in ways they never have before! The only way to do this is to give them a solid foundation of data and then building conceptual tools separately for each project or theory. Or in short, bioinformatics for archaeology.

The first issue of laziness collecting the data or just the sheer excess of data isn't easily solvable I suspect. One can attempt to make it easier by providing a starting point for the actual object however. Every find; every item, should have a requisite photo(s). Let's face it; in archaeology you are dealing with real world 3d objects. It's not a formula, or conceptual understanding of something so much as it is an object in front of you. That you can hold, feel, touch, smell and because it's a real world representation of an object; it should have a photo. From that photo we should be able to extrapolate and acquire GPS coordinates based on the location of the object and then as much facets as we can possibly conceive of. Any measurements should be explicitly metric and all the facets possible should be available. Sounds easy but I clearly have to do much more research here to see what's feasible. In my case I plan on using my apartment as an archaeological dig site and classifiying all of the objects that I find.

The second issue of exposing the data I will do via web semantics. So all of my data should be available in a structured but query-able fashion. I should then be able to pull all that data together and create a slideshow or exhibition with the proper curation. This all sounds easy to me right now, in my head, but we'll see what stumps I hit as I try to implement this; of course, in Plone

[1]: http://www.nps.gov/archeology/tools/distlearn.htm