Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

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funded with public money <strong>in</strong> the United K<strong>in</strong>gdom are required to make their data publicly available,
publish<strong>in</strong>g mandates differ greatly among U.S. funders.
Open Context, 207 an “open access data publication service for archaeology” created by the Alexandria
Archive Institute, is attempt<strong>in</strong>g to address some of these issues of data shar<strong>in</strong>g and openly accessible
publication. In an article that describes Open Context, Kansa et al. (2007) explicate why data shar<strong>in</strong>g
and dissem<strong>in</strong>ation are particularly complicated for archaeology:
Among the primary technical and conceptual issues <strong>in</strong> shar<strong>in</strong>g field data is the question of how
to codify our documentation. Archaeologists generally lack consensus on standards of
record<strong>in</strong>g and tend to make their own customized databases to suit the needs of their <strong>in</strong>dividual
research agendas, theoretical perspectives, and time and budgetary constra<strong>in</strong>ts. … Because of
this variability, databases need extensive documentation for others to decipher their contents
(Kansa et al. 2007).
Consequently, the authors propose that just mak<strong>in</strong>g archaeological data sets available for download
will not solve this basic problem and that a better solution is to “serve archaeological databases <strong>in</strong>
dynamic, onl<strong>in</strong>e websites, thus mak<strong>in</strong>g content easy to browse and explore.” Open Context seeks to
make the publish<strong>in</strong>g and dissem<strong>in</strong>ation of cultural heritage collections both easier and more affordable.
The basic architecture of Open Context is a flexible database that allows researchers to publish
structured data, textual narratives, and media on the web us<strong>in</strong>g only open-source technologies. 208 Open
Context supports “publish<strong>in</strong>g, explor<strong>in</strong>g, search<strong>in</strong>g, and analyz<strong>in</strong>g multiple museum collections and
field research datasets.”
Open Context utilizes only a subset of the “OCHRE data structure (ArchaeoML),” for Kansa states that
while OCHRE “provides sophisticated data-management tools targeted for active research projects”
the goal of Open Context is “to support streaml<strong>in</strong>ed, web-based access and community organization of
diverse cultural heritage content” (Kansa et al. 2007). The project ultimately decided to use
ArchaeoML 209 because of its flexibility:
Overly rigid standards may <strong>in</strong>hibit <strong>in</strong>novation <strong>in</strong> research design and poorly accommodate
“legacy” datasets. … The flexibility of ArchaeoML enables Open Context to deliver content
from many different research projects and collections. A web-based publish<strong>in</strong>g tool called
“Penelope” enables <strong>in</strong>dividual contributors to upload their own data tables and media files and
submit them for review and publication <strong>in</strong> Open Context. This tool enables web publication of
research while ensur<strong>in</strong>g that a project’s orig<strong>in</strong>al record<strong>in</strong>g system and term<strong>in</strong>ology are reta<strong>in</strong>ed
(Kansa et al. 2007).
The ability of standards such as ArchaeoML to provide some basic level of <strong>in</strong>teroperability while also
support<strong>in</strong>g the <strong>in</strong>clusion of legacy structures is thus an essential feature for any cyber<strong>in</strong>frastructure for
archaeology.
Another important issue that Open Context seeks to address is the challenge of open access and
copyright. All Open Context contributors reta<strong>in</strong> copyright to their own content, but Kansa et al. (2007)
state that they are encouraged to publish their data elsewhere to better support dissem<strong>in</strong>ation and
207 http://opencontext.org/
208 Another project that seeks to provide an <strong>in</strong>tegrated open-source “Archaeological Information System” is the Open Archaeology Software Suite
(https://launchpad.net/openarchaeology).
209 Details on how ArchaeoML has been implemented <strong>in</strong> the Open Context system, as well as on their approach to copyright and open access, can be found
<strong>in</strong> Kansa et al. (2010).