Heathrow T5 archaeology data released under Creative Commons

From PastThinking:

Last week, Framework Archaeology launched an update to their Archaeology at Heathrow T5 website. The update includes an improved version of their (Windows only) free GIS that allows you to explore the hard archaeological data collected during “Perry Oaks” phase of the investigations.

Crucially, the raw data behind the GIS has been released in a variety of useful formats. It is released under a Creative Commons license (Attribution-NonCommercial), so it’s free to use for whatever you like so long as you don’t make any money from it.

Formats include CSV, XML, SHP and GML. The photographs and scanned section drawings are also available to download.

Despite being announced on a few mailing lists, it appears to have slipped under the radar of most people. To release this much raw data about such an important and interesting archaeological site, under a flexible license that encourages reuse, is quite a milestone.

This sounds like great news. The next step is to see what others will eventually do with the T5 data. I'm thinking about the creation of a free dataset for the Quantitative Archaeology Wiki tutorials.