AGAIN: sharing the data

[Sebastian Rahtz]

Giancarlo Macchi wrote:
> We would be
> very grateful if maybe you can provide and post some links of
> repositories where you guys in U.K. have already solved the
> problem of archaeological data sharing: metadata, open formats,
> readability of the data 100 years from now etc?
>
As already noted, we have a national data service
(http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/) for archaeology. There's
a lot of stuff around there on this subject. The day to
day problems of physically managing data, migrating
to new systems, etc, are covered by all the components
of the  AHDS;  metadata and open formats are
also common to all of them, though the exact standards
vary.

Coincidentally, the ADS have a workshop next week
on "XML for archaeologists"
(http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/project/workshop/research06.html)
at which I am talking; one of the things I wanted to discuss
was the relationship between working data stores,
and archival forms. My example is from a classical
project with a large clunky relational database, which
does their daily work; but which would be useless handed
over to someone else. So the point is to export to
an archival XML form using a well-understood schema.
No big deal, really; but to illustrate the idea that
your archival/interchange format is not your
working format. One of the side effects is
being able to offer the XML as a machine-accessible
source via web services.

-- 
Sebastian Rahtz      

Information Manager, Oxford University Computing Services
13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN. Phone +44 1865 283431

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