IOSA.it Open Archaeology

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.

Please take some minutes to read the petition for public geodata on http://publicgeodata.org and if you feel that you agree with the arguments of the petition, sign it and spread the message. Thank you.

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.

The Indo-U.S. Science & Technology Forum on Digital Archaeology was held at Mussoorie, India on November 11-13, 2005. Among technology issues discussed at the forum, several presentations were given on the role of X3D in archaeology.

The STOA Consortium is a blog-based web portal whose goal is "Serving news, projects, and links for digital classicists everywhere" as said in their mission statement. Stolen from their about page, they intend:

• to foster a new style of refereed scholarly publications in the humanities not only of interest to specialists but also -- and just as importantly -- accessible by design and choice of medium to wide public audiences.
• to develop and refine new models for scholarly collaboration via the internet.
• to help insure the long-term interoperability and archival availability of electronic materials.
• to support resolutions to copyright and other issues as they arise in the course of scholarly electronic publication.

It seems great, and because I just love back-linking, I put a link here so that everyone can come and see. Wait, these are not our goals, but we believe that such things are very important too and

Digital Culture (DigiCULT) is an IST Support Measure (IST-2001-34898) to establish a regular technology watch for cultural and scientific heritage over the period of 30 months (03/2002-08/2004).

The mission of DigiCULT

Benefiting the Cultural Heritage sector, through monitoring and assessing existing and emerging technologies that provide opportunities to optimise the development, access to, and preservation of Europe's rich cultural and scientific heritage, within the emerging digital cultural economy.

DigiCULT draws on the results of the strategic study "Technological
Landscapes for Tomorrow's Cultural Economy - DigiCULT",
that was initiated by the European Commission, DG Information Society
(Unit D2: Cultural Heritage Applications) in 2000 and completed
in 2001.

This study covers several areas of interest, (national policies & initiatives, organisational change, exploitation, and ICT) and formulates a series of recommendations. In particular, it provides a roadmap of how cultural heritage technologies will or could develop in the near future (until 2006).