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.

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.

Some days ago Newsforge published an article by Marco Fioretti entitled Uncovering FOSS in archaeology, which deals quite specifically with a great number of themes that we are discussing and studying.
The Grosseto workshop was covered, too, and of course IOSA is mentioned as well as other good friends of ours: Arc-Team, ASIAA Lab.
If some of our readers find it worthy, it would be nice to have some more comments on the Newsforge page, to show there's some interest.

The UNESCO Free Software Portal gives access to documents and websites which are references for the Free Software/Open Source Technology movement. It is also a gateway to resources related to Free Software.

With the Free Software Portal, UNESCO provides a single interactive access point to pertinent information for users who wish to acquire an understanding of the Free Software movement, to learn why it is important and to apply the concept. Visitors to the UNESCO Free Software Portal can browse through pre-established categories or search for specific words. They can add a new link or modify an already existing link.

The Open Source Geospatial Foundation has been created to support and build the highest-quality open source geospatial software. The foundation's goal is to encourage the use and collaborative development of community-led projects. The website serves as a portal for users and developers to share their ideas and contribute to project development.
Among the founding projects, GRASS GIS, UMN Mapserver, the GDAL libraries, Mapbuilder, and more.