IOSA.it Open Archaeology

I'm very very happy to tell everybody, we have finally published the photos taken during Genoa's workshop on May 2007. You can find them in the following related link: http://picasaweb.google.it/IOSAteam/2WorkshopOpenSourceFreeSoftwareEOpen...

Some time ago I posted here the first of a series of tutorials about the use of Graphviz for producing an Harris matrix. The second part I'm writing is a bit more technical, and shows how to use the Python language to create a custom application that makes recording easier and faster for most users.
The Python-Graphviz bindings I chose are the pygraphviz ones. One thing I immediately noticed was that a method for using the tred command was missing. And I had just showed you how much it was useful...
So, I filed an enhancement request for the pygraphviz library. Shortly after that, I wrote a small patch that implemented a tred() method. And a few days later, one of the developers came out with a much better patch and implementation of the whole thing.

The 1st Annual Antiquist Workshop will be hosted at Southampton
University Archaeology Department in April 2008. The purpose of the
Workshop is to provide postgraduate students in Archaeological
Informatics and associated disciplines with the opportunity to:

ArchCamp is a one-day unconference for archaeology - based on the idea of a BarCamp. Basically an opportunity for all archaeological computing people to get together and present their current ideas/theories/hare-brained schemes in a structure decided by the participants on the day.

This year ArchCamp will be right after CAA UK (which is on the 1st/2nd Feb), and will take place at Evil Eye Lounge, York (to be confirmed), hosted by the Archaeology department of the University of York.

More info at http://www.antiquist.org/wiki/index.php?title=Current_events

The CAA UK chapter is intended as a forum for research in the area of archaeological computing and quantitative methods. The chapter meeting aims to facilitate exchange of ideas between researchers and cultural resource managers, and is particularly focused on the presentation of new and innovative research areas. The meeting organisers are also particularly keen to encourage new researchers to present their work for the first time.

The CAA UK 2008 Chapter Meeting will be jointly hosted by the Department of Archaeology of the University of York, the Archaeology Data Service and Internet Archaeology on 1-2 February 2008. Keep an eye on this website for announcements and updates. Please send any enquiries to the organising committee on caauk@ads.ahds.ac.uk.

More info at http://www.york.ac.uk/conferences/caauk2008/

Presso l'Università degli Studi di Padova – Dipartimento di Archeologia si sta organizzando il 3° Workshop Open Source, Free Software e Open Format nei processi di ricerca archeologica. In continuità con le edizioni precedenti (Grosseto 2006 , Genova 2007), l'evento di portata nazionale si svolgerà nelle due giornate dell'8 e 9 maggio 2008 a Padova.

La natura e le finalità del workshop possono sintetizzarsi nei seguenti punti:

1. confronto tra diverse esperienze pratiche circa l'utilizzo del software open source nella disciplina archeologica e riflessione sull'opportunità e sui vantaggi dell'uso di tali applicativi in archeologia;
2. necessità dell'utilizzo di linguaggi e formati aperti per la comunicazione e lo scambio del dato archeologico;
3. problematiche legislative e culturali relative alla libera circolazione dei dati;

The Opengeodata blog has an interesting post about choosing the right license for geodata produced by open data lovers like the OSM project is: http://www.opengeodata.org/?p=262.
First point there is recognizing that all geodata is subject to database right where this exists (EU), but it's quite unclear in the US, for example.
The second notable argument is the distinction between the scientific world, where social (vs legal) rules of attribution are well established, and other fields like geodata, where a rigorous legal attribution is to be preferred. Thus, public domain for scientific data may be a good choice, but it isn't for geodata.
Archaeology of course falls in the first category...