Working Groups/archaeology/minutes/2010-10

Agenda
introduction from in-progress content)
 * ethics statement
 * data questionnaire
 * restructuring of wiki page (creating sub-pages, separating
 * methodology store proposal

Attending

 * Stefano Costa
 * David Stott
 * Anthony Beck (had to leave before end)

Ethics
Anthony discussed about an ethics interdisceplinary meeting at       Leeds university, possibly involving institutions like EH + CBA + IFA + etc etc This meeting would happen sometimes in 2011. As before, we agreed that the UK focus of this initiative (rather than international outreach as would be implied by the       WG focus) is initially due to stakeholeder buy-in. Also it will be easier to act as exemplar for wider involvement.

Questionnaire
How do we get people involved on a wider, international basis? There is an interesting COMMUNIA meeting in December in Istanbul that could potentially give us some more

Method store proposal for the Open Knowledge Foundation
This was the main item under discussion given the wide interest it has, see Jo Walsh's response and formal request to the OKF Coord Group http://goo.gl/TstBq

Ontologies- the method store could be used to develop a       folksonomoy of concepts (community ontology) which can be used to extend the formal ontology (CiDOC) - usually out-of-reach for laymen.

The best idea we had so far is to go towards integrating a       stackoverflow-like platform (see e.g. http://askubuntu.com/ and        http://ideas.okfn.org/ - latter lives on OKF servers and is        based on open source software) and a wiki. More complex solutions like http://www.taverna.org.uk/ and http://www.myexperiment.org/workflows were deemed too complex at       this stage, but might be more viable in the future. Some worked examples: meaningful metadata)
 * 1) explaining processes for PhD students (reproducibility,
 * 1) processes explained from general to detail
 * 2) Excavation, arbitrary etc (transparency)
 * 3) assessing & understanding data quality

Setting deadlines for the implementation of this platform is       vital.

General remarks
After the initial enthusiasm, activity of the working group is       quite low now. Some low-hanging fruits in the TODO list are for example: http://epigraphy.packhum.org/inscriptions/ ) datasets to CKAN or       investigating license terms via http://isitopendata.org/         (linked, open) archaeological data        http://archaeology.okfn.org/
 * adding open (and non-open crucial e.g.
 * collecting best practices and recommendations for disseminating
 * keeping wiki pages clean and clear
 * starting a WG collaborative blog at