IOSA.it Open Archaeology

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.

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.

SIMILE is a joint project conducted by the W3C, MIT Libraries, and MIT CSAIL. SIMILE seeks to enhance inter-operability among digital assets, schemata/vocabularies/ontologies, metadata, and services. A key challenge is that the collections which must inter-operate are often distributed across individual, community, and institutional stores. We seek to be able to provide end-user services by drawing upon the assets, schemata/vocabularies/ontologies, and metadata held in such stores. SIMILE will leverage and extend DSpace, enhancing its support for arbitrary schemata and metadata, primarily though the application of RDF and semantic web techniques. The project also aims to implement a digital asset dissemination architecture based upon web standards. The dissemination architecture will provide a mechanism to add useful "views" to a particular digital artifact (i.e. asset, schema, or metadata instance), and bind those views to consuming services.

Ida is an open-source documentation tool especially designed for culture historical use that is being developed in 3D-bridge project. It is *not* an image database nor it is a document database. IDA allows different perspectives to the same material and it offers tools to the documentation of the research process. The aim is to provide system, that allows you to own the research material. More precisely, you can act like you owned the material. This means, that you could treat the material freely,you can add your own notes to the material and you can organise it as you like without causing any interference to the original data.

This site presents the open source tools used and developed for visualisation of culture heritage. The flow starts with IDA which is a documentation tool. With it the material can be organised and the reconstruction process could be documented. Visualisation is made with Inkscape and Blender. The visualisation is shown by using application that renders the view with OpenSceneGraph.