the Digital Archaeologial Record Developing an Information Infrastructure for Archaeology Arizona State University School of Human Evolution & Social Change — School of Computing & Informatics

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Enabling the Study of Long-Term Human and Social Dynamics:
A Cyberinfrastructure for Archaeology
2004 National Science Foundation, Human Social Dynamics Grant 0433959

Workshop I: The Promise and Challenge of Archaeological Data Integration

Any solution to the problem of making archaeological data available and analytically usable across investigators and projects will require a buy-in by the discipline of archaeology. To this end, the first workshop will bring together key individuals representing diverse archaeological constituencies, archaeologists who have worked intensively on problems of data documentation and data sharing, and computer scientists engaged in issues of data integration. This workshop will focus on data integration issues for archaeology and closely related problems for human skeletal collections (physical anthropology). It will also draw on the experience of individuals in other disciplines in dealing with fundamental problems of informatics and data integration. One result of the workshop will be a white paper presenting a vision of a cyberinfrastructure for archaeology, summarizing its scientific importance, laying out the fundamental challenges, and outlining a strategy to achieve that vision.

Challenges
Sociological. There needs to be a frank discussion of what are essentially sociological problems involved in any such enterprise. This will include a discussion of intellectual property and the circumstances under which people would agree to share data. (Optimally, metadata would be entered into the system as databases are being developed; however, investigators may require some period during which they would have exclusive access to the data.) For some classes of archaeological data (notably site location) there are questions of data confidentiality and arbitrating requests for access. The issue will doubtless arise of how distributed the system would be and what sort of entity could control its core implementation in a way that would adequately address the needs of academic, museum, and CRM researchers. A discussion of the sociological challenges will also include the mechanisms by which incorporation of data in the system could be encouraged or perhaps required (professional societies, journals, and governmental entities could be involved).
Technical. Some of the challenges to integrating and sharing data are essentially archaeological and others are basically computer science problems, but it is our expectation that many of the technical challenges lie somewhere in between and will require working together—with new thinking on the part of archaeologists with respect to how data can be integrated—and creativity on the part of computer scientists in developing conceptualizations of the problems that are both responsive to the archaeological issues and technically tractable. Many problems will likely revolve around the development of formal ontologies, metadata standards, and procedures for using metadata to map existing datasets onto the relevant ontology. In this workshop we will briefly explore the extent to which tools already developed can be adapted to the problems that we face. (A more thorough exploration of these tools will occur in the context of the second workshop on technical issues.)
Financial. Of course, we need also to discuss how the development and persistence of this vision can be funded. This will involve funding of several components: the overhead involved in the development of the infrastructure and its ongoing refinement and maintenance, the entry of key legacy datasets into the archive, and assurance that future projects are incorporated into the system. For future projects, we expect that incorporation of new databases into the system may be funded by the source paying for the fieldwork and analysis, as part of the overall project cost.

Strategy
The final topic of discussion of the workshop will be to develop a strategy to move forward with the agenda—to think though the steps that are involved and how the field might most effectively proceed. In this discussion, again, we expect to learn from the experience of other disciplines and, in particular, the experience of NCEAS, which has now been working toward analogous goals in ecology for several years.

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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.