IOSA.it Open Archaeology

During the past year we have started developing free / open source software to meet some needs of our archaeological jobs.
We follow standard community open development practices, ranging from mailing lists for discussing roadmaps and providing user support to open repositories of source code in decentralized version control systems. Tools we are working on include:

• Total Open Station, a program to download and export data from your total station using any operating system
• GNUCal, a clone of current software tools that perform radiocarbon age calibration
• a set of algorithms to do statistical analyses of stone walls
• a program to automate the generation of the Harris Matrix diagram

On the 7th of May 2008, there will be a meeting with Richard
Stallman, one of the Free Software's main "philosophers", in Savona's Campus of the University of Genova(Italy).

Richard Stallman is going to discuss about "Copyright vs Community in the Age of Computer Networks" .

It would be a pity to loose the opportunity to meet one of the gurus that has founded GNU Linux and the Free Software Foundation.

More informations writing here : spes@campus-savona.it .

Thus let's go guys!!!!

The Iosa's team is proud to inform that we have just completed the Italian Tutorial of one of the most common and useful software we use in the development of our tools: Mercurial. It is a Distributed CSM, it allow us to contribute to the implementation of our softwares in parallel wherever we are. Because of it's efficacy, We have decided to translate the tutorial of one of our favourite program to help our Italian colleagues to enjoy it during the software development's processes.
You can find out Tutorial in Mercurial's Tutorial with other languages' ones : http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/index.cgi/Tutorial

We hope to put on the Iosa's site any software we will develop, we hope soon.

There are lots of people assuming archaeological users are not an interesting market(and probably they're right), in particular if they cannot access the money and the projects carried on with government and big institutions, like universities and research groups. In this way the "poor" ordinary archaeologist couldn't hope having updated and modern software instruments, because the rare modern ones own to private companies that sell them at really high prices.

There's a way to get out the nightmare of not having modern tools for our researches and jobs: referring to open source software.
If people developing archaeological software release it with open licences, it's possible to maintain those tools updated, because everyone who needs them can use them and everyone that thinks they're not enough good, can improve them.

Open Archaeology is an umbrella-project that will host a number of sub-projects. While functional at a component level these sub-projects are intended to interoperate creating a complete AIS (Archaeological Information System), including the components necessary to manage the organisation carrying out the archaeology.

Open Archaeology is first a concept or philosophy, with the 3 primary strands of open data, open standards and open source. More information can be found at the Open Archaeology homepage (http://openarchaeology.net). The philosophy has been around for some time; the software project started during 2006 by Oxford Archaeology (http://thehumanjourney.net), and was moved to Launchpad in 2007.