Working Group on Open Data in Archaeology

Purpose

1. Act as a central point of reference and support for people interested in open archaeological data

2. Identify relevant projects and practices. Promote best practices as well as legal and technical standards for making data open (such as the Open Knowledge Definition).

3. Act as a hub for the development and maintenance of low cost, community driven projects related to open data and archaeology.

Working Group activities

Members

• Please see the list of active and invited members

Participate

• To participate in the group's activities, please join http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-archaeology introducing yourself and saying

  • why you want to join the working group and
  • what you intend to contribute.

Meetings

• The regular Meeting takes place third Wednesday of the month from 15.00-17.00 GMT

• we keep /minutes of meetings

• see http://wiki.okfn.org/wg/schedule for a general overview

Mailing list

There is a mailing list at http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-archaeology where anyone can subscribe. Mailing list archives are public: be sure to read message #0 with a brief roadmap.

Coordinating the working group

• monthly audio conference calls
• use the task manager (see below)
• consolidate action in the UK, develop awareness in other countries

Tasks

We have a task tracker for long-term goals and structured actions. If you think you can use it, please ask for an account. It's mainly used by the Coordinator.

• OKF Task Tracker - wg.archaeology

Projects

Open Archaeology Data Group

• Open Archaeology Data Group on CKAN - a community driven registry of open data in archeology, lists already registered open data resources

Is it open data?

Looking at whether existing projects are compliant with the Open Knowledge Definition and making publicly accessibly enquiries using Is It Open? service. For example:

• Archaeology Data Service hosts a large number of collections from the UK -- see their statement about rights management

• Pompeian Households: An On-line Companion and its copyright and credit information (no all rights reserved mentioned)

• Alphabetical list of Open Access Journals in Ancient Studies and Abzu have both continuously updated lists of open access journals. The license of these two websites is CC-BY-NC-SA, however the most important thing is that - in theory - archaeological data published in open access journals should be in fact Open Archaeological Data. Is this true?

• Raw data downloads « Archaeology at Heathrow Terminal 5 under CC-BY-NC

• IntCal04 Supplemental Data for calibration of radiocarbon dates (license unknown)

• ArchaeoPix 526 archaeology-related pictures under CC-BY(-SA) from Flickr

• The West Bank and East Jerusalem Searchable Map under CC-BY-NC-SA, won the ASOR Open Archaeology Prize (past winners here)

Open Archaeology News

• Open Data in Archaeology news/blog feed aggregation?
• List relevant feeds + create, e.g. Friend Feed room for these?

• Connotea: Bookmarks matching tag oa.archaeology is a collaborative tagging effort - the Open Access Tracking Project is here so seems a good place for our purposes

• #openarcheo is the proposed (hash)tag for everything related to Open Data in Archaeology

Metadata proposal

Adding geospatial and temporal metadata to CKAN entries (using extra keys) seems a good idea for making it possible e.g. to have a search engine where you can ask for data "in England, from 1000 BC to 64 AD"). Geospatial bounding box is easily defined with WGS84 lon/lat coordinates. Time coordinates may be less easy to define in a neutral way, i.e. one that doesn't assume contemporary Western calendar as a standard (even though it's probably the best option, perhaps labeling years as BCE/CE - Before Common Era instead of BC/AD). Need to discuss this briefly and then write a simple howto on finding geospatial and time coordinates for a dataset.

Do some of these examples work for the above? Some feedback about their use and effectiveness would be good.

• General introduction to Web services in Open Context

• Query bound by spatial coordinates and time constraints, available in Atom (see links)

• Summary query results in Google Maps (from facets)

See also http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Location_in_CKAN for a prior proposal that has already some support from CKAN development team, based on tags rather than "deterministic" geotagging.

Blogging Open Archaeology

On the OKFN blog:

• [http://blog.okfn.org/2010/02/25/open-data-in-archaeology/|Open Data in Archeology] by Stefano Costa

• [http://blog.okfn.org/2010/06/10/dig-the-new-breed-how-open-approaches-can-empower-archaeologists-part-i/|Dig the New Breed: How open approaches can empower archaeologists- Part I] by Stefanie Doll (part 1 of 3)

• another series of posts is in progress by Anthony Beck and Jo Walsh

Ethics in Archaeology

• http://pad.okfn.org/ethics (linked to posts above)

Publicity

• Stefano Costa to promote at CAA meeting in April http://www.caa2010.org/ (done)

• Email to relevant archaeology lists (done)

  • Antiquist

  • ARCHCOMP-L@LISTSERV.BUFFALO.EDU

  • archaeology@lists.linux.it

  • archeologia@gfoss.it

  • ... others (local mailing lists for Germany, Austria, perhaps Greece)

Open Heritage Event

More to be written.

Related links

• Digital Humanities @ OKFN

• http://www.iosa.it/

• http://openarchaeology.net/contents/open-standards

• http://ogcuser.opengeospatial.org/node/98 (here "open" is meant more in the sense of using standard protocols than actually making data open)

• Original notes on Etherpad - http://etherpad.com/odfY6QoQj5

• The Stoa Consortium for Electronic Publication in the Humanities

• Open Access Data in Archaeology: a brief roadmap by Stefano Costa

• Jordan Hatcher, lawyer and legal consultant conducting the study Usage of Creative Commons by cultural heritage organisations and working on an open data licence