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Digital Archaeologial Record |  Project Home |
Synopsis
With support from two National Science Foundation grants, a team of ASU archaeologists and computer scientists is working to design and build a digital information infrastructure (cyberinfrastructure) for systematically collected archaeological data. Once archaeologists have registered datasets, researchers across scientific disciplines could, over the Web, extract sensibly integrated and appropriately scaled databases of analytically comparable observations from numerous archaeological datasets gathered using incommensurate recording protocols. For archaeology, this project has the goals of (1) advancing archaeologists' ability to engage in synthetic and comparative research and (2) of providing a means to maintain the long-term utility and accessibility of irreplaceable primary data in the face of inadequate metadata and rapidly changing technology. In computer science, the challenges are to develop methods (1) for ad hoc data integration where the semantic demands of the query are reconciled with the semantic content of the available datasets and (2) to resolve conflicts in concept-oriented query processing that arise from inconsistent recording strategies (represented as ontologies).
A prototype archiving and data integration system focusing on archaeological faunal data is beging developed under the current grant with the cooperation of the International Council for ArchaeoZoology. This development will be readily extensible to other material classes and is intended to establish an open-source, extensible foundation for a global, archaeological information infrastructure. The initial testbed project will investigate the socioenvironmental conditions that lead to depressed abundance of preferred game—over two millennia in the Southwest and lower Illinois River Valleys in the US. The system will be publicly accessible over the Internet, although users will register. Queries will be concept-oriented, with access not requiring knowledge of the schemas of the available datasets. Data sources will be distributed internationally but will be accessible through a common, research-oriented portal. This infrastructure is being buillt on the GEON platform and will contribute to the development of shared scientific cyberinfrastructure.
Prototype tDAR is still under dvelopment but a beta version is available for use at http://gama.tdar.org.
Click here for a tutorial on the use of tDAR (pdf: 1.5MB).
| Outline Points | Testbed Research - Faunal Resource Depression | Grant Support |
2004 Grant
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This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Nos. 0433959 and 0624341. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
Page Last Updated - 15-May-2008