Archaeological Sites
From BRICKS Developer Community
By utilizing the BRICKS infrastructure, archaeologists can save time, money, and effort by virtually consolidating resources and importing relevant information from external organisations and professionals. Two interesting applications have been designed and developed inside the Archaeological Pillar: Finds Identifier (http://finds.brickscommunity.org:8091/findsidentifier/index.do) and Fortuna Visiva di Pompei (http://pompeii.brickscommunity.org:8080/BricksPompei/).
The Finds Identifier application is an effective tool that supports museums curators in their day-to-day activity of identifying objects across Europe. These objects are brought to the museum by members of the public who discover them whilst out walking, gardening or going about their daily work (farming, building, road construction) or through use of metal detector equipment. Thousands of objects are found every year and such discoveries offer an important source for understanding of the past. Students of archaeology learn to identify archaeological objects by comparing a found object with type examples held in museum collections. The size, shape, colour, weight and material composition of objects all help in identification. Detailed descriptive metadata and photographs are often used in the preliminary identification of objects. Increasingly such information is being made available online. Frequently, objects discovered in one country often originate from another country and thus archaeologists, museum curators and members of the public encounter unfamiliar objects that are difficult to identify. BRICKS offers an opportunity to help students and members of the public to identify their finds by enabling guided searches of well identified and illustrated collections of found archaeological objects from European museums and specialists. The difficulty in integrating archaeological object databases into a common framework is that they do not adhere to a common structure. While they can be mapped to the simple unqualified Dublin Core Metadata Element set, this format would not support the specialised searches required for identification of archaeological objects (such as size, shape, specific type and material). Mapping to the CIDOC-CRM (CIDOC, 2006) offers an alternative approach and a way of supporting the semantic richness of the underlying data while providing a common framework for searches. However, mapping to the CIDOC-CRM is a task that to date has mainly been undertaken by a relatively small group of information specialists. It was recognised that, if archaeological object databases are to be mapped to the CIDOC-CRM for import into BRICKS, there is a need to facilitate the process. So, a CRM mapping tool was developed and it allowed curators to map their dataset to a simplified version of the CRM and to download an XSLT that could be used to transform their data into CRM compatible format on being imported into the BRICKS Node.
Today an end-user interface has been developed to provide users with an intuitive searchand-browse interface as an aid to object identification. The Finds Identifier offers users an alternative to the standard search engine list result view which allows them to select from a object Metadata tree to view subsets of items. In this view, subsets of retrieved items are displayed. Users can click on a metadata item and are presented (in a sub-tree) with a list of the different values in that set. For example, if one searches for Roman coins, 232 are found. In the tree view users can click on Primary Materials and find that 200 of the retrieved coins are made from Copper, 20 from Silver, 4 from base Silver and 2 from gold. Users can then choose to view, for example, the Silver items. This functionality provides users, who may be unfamiliar with descriptive metadata for coins with an intuitive way of exploring the results set and of comparing different types of coins. The user can also display the place where selected objects were found on a map. The comparison of his/her find with objects that were found in the same area can be a valuable help in classification.
You can access the application from here (http://finds.brickscommunity.org:8091/findsidentifier/index.do). For more informations contact Kate Fernie (mailto:kate.fernie@mla.gov.uk)
The Fortuna Visiva of Pompeii application represents a demonstration of BRICKS services to manage and share different kinds of data and information (texts and images) and to join them in a Digital Library. It’s targeted to students, researchers, museum curators, tourists and tourist operators. The application offered an opportunity to integrate a Geographic Information System (GIS) with the BRICKS platform, an important requirement in the field of archaeology as archaeologists often need to link different kinds of documents to a geo-referenced map. This is also important for applications addressed to tourists and young students: the capability of connecting various kinds of information with a place immediately facilitates comprehension and fast learning. The main objectives achieved by the application are:
- To offer a flexible critical instrument for research and education;
- To provide a system for collection, analysis, comparison and access to texts and images;
- To reconcile the needs of specialized users and more general users with an architecture based on a solid scientific basis, capable of displaying information simply;
- To contribute to the preservation and accessibility of rare documents and to the historical evaluation of the archaeological site of Pompeii.
The contents of Pompeii application consist of three related databases in which different kinds of data were originally stored in digital format and catalogued according to a specific metadata schema derived from the CDWA Standard: Iconographic, Edited and Unedited sources. This documentation pertains to ancient books and manuscripts dated from the discovery of Pompeii (1748) until the end of the XIX century. Another important content of this application is the GIS provided by the Archaeological Superintendence of Pompeii. It provides geographical data for the ancient area of Pompeii (approximately ½ square mile) that were originally stored in ESRI proprietary software. You can access the application from here (http://pompeii.brickscommunity.org:8080/BricksPompei/). For more informations contact Emilia Masci (mailto:e.masci@sns.it)
