Archeos-dev Digest, Vol 16, Issue 4

[Ricardo Gaidão]

I really don't know if we are talking about two different web gis, with different goals:

1) A digital inventory based in GIS. Allowing to georeference and manage archaeological sites, providing for each: category, description, legal status, photos, drawings (...) 

or

2) A archaeological excavation management tool. A software that can describe and organize archaeological stratigraphic units, their relations, artifacts inventory and graphic records in a similar way like:

Integrated Archaeological Database project
http://www.iadb.org.uk/

Nabonidus
http://www.nabonidus.org/features.aspx)

ArchaeoCAD
http://www.arctron.com/Software/System_Overview/

Stratify
http://www.stratify.org/

The Open Archaeology Software Suite (developing stage?)
http://openarchaeology.net/contents/about
https://launchpad.net/openarchaeology

or Harris Matrix Composer?
http://www.harrismatrixcomposer.com/harris/

There aren't many free/open, functional excavation management tools. The creation of such project would make easy the life of archaeologists around the globe and make more easy for them to share information, using common standards and open formats.

I think this option is very useful and even necessary. I don't see why Archaeology is different from sciences like Geography in the adoption of standard scientific criteria.

Chronological and regional particularities are always accessory and not crucial. In a database they can be turned off in contexts where they don't apply. 

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Fabrizio Furnari said:

Hi all,
I apologize in advance for my ignorance on this as I'm not an archaeologist;
in this moment I'll try only to put some questions about this project.
The first question is about the market "our" software will try to break:
aren't any specifical webgis for this that can be adapted for our purposes?
I think we could be in competition with other minor softwares present on the
scene...

The other question is about the possibility to extend the software to comply
with other countries/research team specification. Do you think will be
possible to set up a full-purpose database with features that can be
activated/deactivated on the fly to match the situation's requests?

Last but not least I propose, to start this project that could be hardly
bound to archeos, to use our github space to host the code/issues/wiki. As
usual the URL is https://github.com/archeos/ just let me know...

Fabrizio