IOSA.it Open Archaeology

Pleiades is an international research community, devoted to the study of ancient geography, organized by the Ancient World Mapping Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, U.S.A. The Pleiades project is open and aims at bringing together a global community of scholars, students and enthusiasts.

Their about page says:

The Pleiades web portal is being built atop the open-source Plone Content Management System, with the addition of a number of plugin components (Plone "Products"). All modifications and special-purpose plugins developed by the Pleiades Community will be released to the public for free re-use under compatible, open-source licensing.

It's encouraging to see that such a large project benefits from free software and, at the same time, gives back to the community.

MAGIS is an inventory of regional archaeological survey projects in the greater Mediterranean region. The website features a spatial search engine, a database search, and data entry interface for registered scholars.

What's special about MAGIS is that its whole infrastructure is based on free software:

Gutenkarte is a geographic text browser, intended to help readers explore the spatial component of classic works of literature. Gutenkarte downloads public domain texts from Project Gutenberg, and then feeds them to MetaCarta's GeoParser API, which extracts and returns all the geographic locations it can find. Gutenkarte stores these locations in a database, along with citations into the text itself, and offers an interface where the book can be browsed by chapter, by place, or all at once on an interactive map. Ultimately, Gutenkarte will offer the ability to annotate and correct the places in the database, so that the community will be able construct and share rich geographic views of Project Gutenberg's enormous body of literary classics.

We are happy to announce that a new stable version of GRASS GIS has been released today. This release adds hundreds of new features, support for the latest GIS data formats, and includes new translations for many languages. The Geographic Resources Analysis Support System, commonly referred to as GRASS, is a Geographic Information System (GIS) combining powerful raster, vector, and geospatial processing engines into a single integrated software suite. GRASS includes tools for spatial modeling, visualization of raster and vector data, management and analysis of geospatial data, and the processing of satellite and aerial imagery. It also provides the capability to produce sophisticated presentation graphics and hardcopy maps. GRASS is currently used around the world in academic and commercial settings as well as by many governmental agencies and environmental consulting companies. It runs on a variety of popular hardware platforms and is Free open-source software released under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

GMT is an open source collection of ~60 tools for manipulating geographic and Cartesian data sets (including filtering, trend fitting, gridding, projecting, etc.) and producing Encapsulated PostScript File (EPS) illustrations ranging from simple x-y plots via contour maps to artificially illuminated surfaces and 3-D perspective views. GMT supports ~30 map projections and transformations and comes with support data such as coastlines, rivers, and political boundaries. GMT is developed and maintained by Paul Wessel and Walter H. F. Smith with help from a global set of volunteers, and is supported by the National Science Foundation. It is released under the GNU General Public License.

surfit is a computer program which enables to calculate regular grid from various data (scattered points, curves, surfaces, etc), conditions and inequalities by setting called gridding rules. surfit implements the original gridding method. surfit is an Open Source and Free Software, the source code is available free of charge under the Free Software GPL license. The code is written in C++ with STL usage. Careful attention is paid to performance related issues. The initial goal of surfit is to provide an efficient tool to scientists dealing with gridding computational tasks.

SNNSraster is a utility for quick ANN analysis of raster GIS maps with the use of Stuttgart Neural Network Simulator trained network files. It was developed to read and write binary raster files.