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The Transatlantic Archaeology Gateway: fishing data from the pond Jon Bateman and Stuart Jeffrey

The Transatlantic Archaeology Gateway: fishing data from the pond Jon Bateman and Stuart Jeffrey Archaeology Data Service. Background. Aims The TAG project aims to develop an infrastructure to support, bring together and enhance digital content funded in the USA & UK Funding

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The Transatlantic Archaeology Gateway: fishing data from the pond Jon Bateman and Stuart Jeffrey

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  1. The Transatlantic Archaeology Gateway: fishing data from the pond Jon Bateman and Stuart Jeffrey Archaeology Data Service

  2. Background • Aims • The TAG project aims to develop an infrastructure to support, bring together and enhance digital content funded in the USA & UK • Funding • JISC/NEH Transatlantic Digitisation Collaboration Grants – Phase 2 • Duration • Project Start Date: 1 Oct 2009 • Project End Date: 31 Mar 2011

  3. Partners and people Julian Richards - ADS Director Stuart Jeffrey - TAG Project Manager for the ADS Catherine Hardman - ADS Collections Development Manager Lei Xia – ADS Applications Developer Jon Bateman – ADS Curatorial Officer Keith W. Kintigh - Digital Antiquity PI/Prof. of Anthropology Katherine A. Spielmann - Prof. of Anthropology [fauna] Matt Cordial - ASU Libraries Cyberinfrastructure Services [Fedora] Mary Whelan - SU Libraries Cyberinfrastructure Services [Geospatial] Allen Lee - Research Professional/Software John Howard - Head Librarian, University College Dublin Frank McManamon – Executive Director, Digital Antiquity

  4. Work Package One • To build upon existing web services registries maintained by the ADS for the historic environment sector in Europe and extends these for North American usage. A web services application will then be developed to create a standards-compliant cross-search facility for metadata records held by ADS (for the UK) and tDAR (for the USA)

  5. Work Package Two In a second stage a richer and deeper web services cross-search facility will be developed for faunal remains databases in England (UK) and the USA, providing an architecture to enable deep data mining as well as a valuable research tool for archaeologists in the UK and USA.

  6. Vision Users can search across repositories held in the US and the UK to locate digital archives using what, where, when criteria (WP1) Users can identify archives that have faunal databases mapped to a common ontology to allow cross searching (WP2) The databases are not held in the same physical location, and need not be in the same hardware/software, nor even have the same field names or attributes

  7. But what do what, where and when mean? • Contextual terms • Need classification • Interoperability through mapping to agreed common terms or ontologies • Pragmatism

  8. Barriers to knowledge connections • Epistemological barriers may be technical as well as conceptual • Establishing common ground can break down geographical boundaries between archaeological data and knowledge

  9. Removing barriers • Conceptual barriers are often aligned with technical barriers • Removing these technical barriers helps to focus on the real conceptual difficulties

  10. How low can you go? • Distilled top-level classification terms • High-level common ground restricts both the scope and granularity of the information • Finding common ground in a single domain (eg faunal remains) increases granularity • Explosion of terms

  11. Single domain granularity

  12. Descriptive scales and fuzzy terms • Forced classification can hide scales of difference and similarity • eg date terms mapped to absolute ranges give a common scale but do nothing to illuminate differences and similarities between the terms/periods

  13. Descriptive scales and fuzzy terms • Mapping terms to high-level ontologies over-clarifies descriptive scales and blurred boundaries • eg Hillfort could be classified as defensive, domestic or commerical, depending on context and interpretation • Strict thesaurii + simplified mappings = missed connections

  14. MIDAS Period List Latitude - Longitude Thesaurus of Monument Types

  15. Just another layer • Multiple classification processes from data creation, through curation, to discovery and use • Imposed by archaeologists through the epistemological process • Understanding classification processes key to crossing boundaries

  16. Natural classification • User-tagging often cited as an alternative to rigid ontologies • Could it supplant classification systems? • Personal • Random • Multitudinous indecipherable systems

  17. Chaotic Curiosities Debris Nothing Everything The Archive Sample Site Structured

  18. Usefulness • Classification systems must be distilled to a point where they have meaning across epistemological boundaries • They are not an end in themselves • They should help answer questions • Understanding their context shapes their use

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