IOSA.it Open Archaeology

Last week I was in Milan for a workshop about the study of pottery from Gortyna, Crete, among all Italian universities working there (flyer and programme here).

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.

p.mapper is a MapServer PHP/MapScript Framework, based on UMN MapServer and PHP/MapScript by DM Solutions. The p.mapper framework is intended to offer broad functionality and multiple configurations in order to facilitate the setup of a MapServer application based on PHP/MapScript. Functions included are:

• DHTML (DOM) zoom/pan interface. Supported browsers: Mozilla/Firefox 1.+/Netscape 6.1+, IE 5/6, Opera 6.+, Konqueror 3.+
• Pan/zoom with mouse wheel, keyboard keys, slider, and reference map
• Query functions (identify, select, search)
• Query results display with database joins and hyperlinks
• Print functions: HTML and PDF
• Configuration of several functions, behaviour and layout via a common INI file
• HTML legends
• Various styles for display of legend and table of contents
• Multilingual user interface (pre-defined: English, German, Italian, French, Swedish)

p.mapper has been tested with MapServer versio