IOSA.it Open Archaeology

A few days ago, thanks to Jonathan Gray of the Open Knowledge Foundation, a proposal for a Working Group on Open Data in Archaeology was drafted. There's a wiki page for coordinating and collecting ideas — which acts also as a brief call for participation until a true one is sent. The idea came out after I discovered (and liked it a lot) the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN ... a name familiar to anyone using Perl or R), an OKF project defined as “Debian of data”. There are already a few packages there tagged “archaeology” and it will be interesting to see how many open data resources are already available in archaeology. Then the working group purpose is going to be promoting best practices for making data open. There's an informal meeting on IRC tomorrow (1830 BST), see you there for those who want to dive in right now. More updates will follow via blog, mailing lists and other. I'm really looking forward this working group as a major effort for bringing the freedom and opportunities of open data into archaeological research and resource management.