Archeos-dev Digest, Vol 16, Issue 4

[albertocosner@libero.it]

hi everybody,
sorry for the english, I want only to bring my suggests or impressions in that issue.
me and other 7 researchers spent the last three years to make a database (gis connected) usefull for historical sources (mainly archeological, from archives, architectural, historical-artistic, bibliografic, oral and from material culture). Now the db is done, it was so difficult manage the differents sources, because the first step that you have to do is thinking about the way that your work have to talk with the cultural items's legislation. In Italy we have a really restricted procedure to record the cultural items, with two big problems: when you finish that procedure the item (that before was only a item) became a cultural item (a subject of the law), and the way that you record the items is different for every kind of sources (also the fields that are quite similar between each others is totally differents if you are recording photo or archaeological item).
we resolved that problem thinking in a different way, the first step was to use the italian legislation only in the fields's definition, not in the codes of the fields (in that way the differences between the differents sources disappear, and I think if we look at the differents way of collecting data sheets "around the world" the problem is quite similar), and the second step is to look at the cultural items (or cultural sources) for the pourpose to identify it in the terms of geographics information, not to analize it in terms of different object-data (in that way you can escape the legislation, that is quite dangerous, and the differents between the sources desappears because all of them are only informations and not objects)
I hope is usefull for the discussion about the "commons collecting data sheets "around the world", and again sorry for the english.
this is the abstract of the Archeo-foss 09 that talk about our project (was refused):

"A SPATIAL DIMENSION FOR A FREE ARCHIVE 
OF HISTORICAL-TERRITORIAL SOURCES 

The purpose of our partecipation is to show how an heterogeneous collection of historical sources can be organized in an unitary and homogeneous archive, tightly connected to each historical-territorial reality and freely accessible through Open Source programs.
The index-linked data will be the result from a three years project for the reserch and location of a set of sources (mainly archeological, from archives, architectural, historical-artistic, bibliografic, oral and from material culture) arising in the Primiero territorial district (North Italy, Trentino, Trento) or otherwise releted to that area.
The basic idea is that, for the historical study of a territory, the main starting point should directly be found in the testimonies of those people that have been living, experiencing, leaving, preserving or destroying that territory. The nature of this collection of sources is a geographical set of territorial information, that can be organized in an homogeneous, non hierarchical and unbiased system; moreover, easily and freely accessible. This approach may represent a new powerful tool for the deep understanding and the correct analysis of a territory.       
Our project develops a complex database system, organized in depth levels (sources collections, sources, grafic and audio files, raster and vectorial visualizations) and the strongly correlated investigation fields (the sources tipologies). This system is based on data menagement Open Source programs, such as “psql”, “phpPgadmin”, “PgAdmin”, “Qgis”, “Mapserver” and “OpenOffice”, and will be available on the WEB and open to implementation.   
Thus, it is necessary to collect as many geographical information as possible with the founded sources, in order to connect each source to a particular geographical data (point, line, area). Then, not only the architectural and archeological sources will have a geographical reference, but also the historical-artistic and material, and possibly the  archive, bibliografic and oral sources. In this way, a spatial and geographical dimension will be coupled to the historical-territorial source, that is the most important tool for the Landscapes Archeology.  
For this purpose, we will have to handle the pubblication of a WebGis, while Qgis and Grass will be complementary for the return and the future analysis of the collected data. In this way, at the end of the reserch the results will be recorded also in a purely spatial-geographical format, besides the usual alphanumeric databases.
Moreover, a special virtual Gis system will be experimented, in order to create a tridimensional model, that would reproduce the usage typology of a territory, based on the typologic study of the material culture."

alberto


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