IOSA.it Open Archaeology

We're unfortunately getting used to this kind of announcements about cuts for research and education bodies. Let's not get used to culture as a minor, unessential ingredient of our society.

Anche quest'anno la cultura dovrà pagare le mancate riforme strutturali del paese.
La SAIA è tra gli enti, istituti e fondazioni che non riceveranno più finanziamenti dallo Stato, decretando così la morte della ricerca archeologica italiana in Grecia, che dura da più di 100 anni, e la fine della più importante scuola di formazione archeologi italiani.

Da oltre un secolo, dapprima come spedizione scientifica di singoli studiosi, poi come Missione stabile ed, infine, nella qualità di Sede ateniese per ricerche e scavi archeologici in Grecia e nelle aree di civiltà ellenica e per la formazione e la specializzazione di giovani studiosi, la Scuola Archeologica Italiana di Atene è il punto di riferimento di tutti gli archeologi e gli storici dell'antichità che dalle Università, dal CNR o dalle Soprintendenze svolgono attività di ricerca in Grecia.

Nata per favorire l'alta formazione dei funzionari delle Soprintendenze archeologiche italiane (ruolo che ha svolto in passato in modo egregio e che continuerà a svolgere in futuro) e come centro di coordinamento delle Missioni italiane in Grecia (e per un certo tempo anche in Oriente) la Scuola ha costituito sin dall'inizio la sintesi tra due funzioni basilari: formazione e ricerca, ospitando anche laureati in architettura che si occupano di restauro, conservazione e studio dei monumenti.

If you can, please sign the petition to save the Italian Archaeological School at Athens.

We have finally managed to put online the video footage of the seminar "Diritti d'autore e banche dati per i Beni Culturali" that we had last year in Genoa on 7 May 2009, organized by grupporicerche.
You can read a brief report and watch videos at this URL: http://www.iosa.it/diritti/ - video files are in the open and free OGG Theora format, and hosted at the Internet Archive. It's all in Italian, we haven't managed to create subtitles yet. If you need help, don't hesitate to ask.
We really hope that this material will be useful to anyone trying to push for open archaeology. More meetings like this one will certainly help clarifying the main issues in the field of copyright assignment and dissemination of archaeological data under free licenses.

ArcheoFOSS 2010, the 5th Italian workshop on “Free software, open source e open format nei processi di ricerca archeologica” took place in Foggia, 6 and May. First of all, it was very good. I'm satisfied with this meeting. Why? Here are some thoughts I sketched while traveling back to Siena.

Lots of talks were about the results and methods of research done by MA and PhD students (myself included) - and this means one of the most important pieces of research, perhaps the most important at all, and the most underrated at the same time. Our community shows a strong connection between education and research. Making this connection stronger is part of our habits, I believe

We're very pleased to announce that the new release of Total Open Station is almost ready. Within a few days we're going to release the 0.2 version of the application.

It will be available for windows, linux and (a little later) apple systems.

There will be a windows exe, already available and packaged.

It has been quite interesting packaging it.
We have used pyInstaller ( http://www.pyinstaller.org/ ) .

When the cmd is open ( on a win sys ofcourse ) and we've reached pyinstaller folder, the comands we've typed are just:

python Makespec.py --tk --noconsole --icon="..\tops.ico" ..\totalopenstation\scripts\totalopenstation-gui.py

python Build.py totalopenstation-gui\totalopenstation-gui.spec

Cool stuff pyinstaller: easy and working!

Tomorrow in the early morning I'm leaving for Granada. CAA 2010 starts on Tuesday. I'm giving two talks, unfortunately both are in the same session so I hope it's not going to be a one-man show (I don't like the idea of an open source ghetto session). As a side note, I noticed that three out of four authors are from Italy.
If you're already around tomorrow in the afternoon, drop me an e-mail and maybe we can arrange for a dinner.

Yesterday 26 March I was in Torino and I had a chance to follow some sessions of the EVPSI meeting, organized by the NEXA Center for Internet & Society, Regione Piemonte and others. EVPSI is acronym for Extracting Value from Public Sector Information.

The entire bulk of information held by public bodies, while primarily produced and maintained for their institutional tasks, can be a “gold-mine” for lots of diverse consumers: commercial users, other public bodies and citizens.

In 2010, using and developing free and open source software for archaeological research is not interesting news: lots of us do that nowadays, and the quality and quantity of available software and programming libraries is something not questionable. But was it the same 5 years ago ? It was very different, believe me. In 2005 the IOSA project was less than one year old, GRASS GIS 6.0 beta was right there and it looked to us like just having a human graphical interface to a free GIS program would help solving any problem. Ubuntu Linux was just a Warty Warthog. But this is history.
What I'm going to write today is instead the archaeology of free and open source software in archaeology. A few weeks ago I found two unrelated items that will fit perfectly in such an archaeological study.