Whew, it’s been a busy and eventful week or so. More detailed posts to follow, but here’s a brief roundup of all that’s new in the world of Archaeogeek. Finally got Mapguide Open Source compiled and working on Ubuntu My presentation on Portable GIS has been accepted for FOSS4G 2007 My southern counterpart is off to do his PhD On that last point, we will be advertising soon to fill Leif’s post (more about it on his blog) and are always on the lookout for archaeological computing types at both offices, so if you’re interested then get in touch and let’s talk!

In Lancaster last week, we hosted a seminar reporting on the results of a project for English Heritage that we’ve been working on since 2003 on managing archaeology in the upland peat areas. The reason for the project was that in the UK and particularly in the North West we have rich archaeological landscapes in and around areas of upland peats. In the Lake District for example, there are prehistoric settlements spreading over wide areas, most of which are covered and protected by a thick band of peat.

Five years after warnings that the war in Iraq would damage some of the world’s most important archaeological finds, the Guardian reports that the Americans have come up with a sure-fire way of protecting the monuments. The most powerful military in the world has issued another set of playing cards, with such exhortations as “Drive around, not over, archaeological sites” (Five of Clubs) Good work guys. That will do the trick.

The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in the UK has recently decided to withdraw funding from the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS). The AHDS has been fundamental in developing best practices for the storage and preservation of digital data for use by researchers in the humanities over the last eleven years. Not only that, but the AHRC appears to have taken no steps at all to ensure the long term preservation of the AHDS data.

Leif has a thought-provoking post up that raises the idea of an ecosystem approach to data-dissemination. In other words, that we should be building a communities of standards-compliant data-providers who can all share each other’s data. Both the new Heritage Gateway, and Swish (representing Scotland and Wales) are planning to allow dissemination of data via web-services at some point, depending on the setup of the individual councils that are providing the data.

Wessex Archaeology are releasing their impressive gallery and flickr collection of photos under a creative commons license, according to Tom at Past Thinking. This is really good news, and shows that the idea of open access is catching on in British Archaeology. I’m going to submit an abstract for FOSS4G07 on the idea of “openness”, be that in terms of data or software, in UK Archaeology, and would welcome any comments or examples of use from readers.

A post from Daily Cup of Tech a while ago inspired me to add a “tumblog” to my site, for short-format posts on tips and tricks. I will be posting to this regularly to build up a library of code snippets, linux and windows tips and archaeological information. It’s taking me a while to get it properly integrated into the site, but the feed is working and can be subscribed to separately from the main site rss].

Archaeogeek is now back in the saddle/desk-chair after a few weeks break- firstly entertaining visiting parents and most recently scuba-diving in the Sound of Mull (Scotland) In the mean time I have a few projects coming to fruition, and have been catching up on a few things that I wanted to learn more about (hello google maps and database integration). Firstly, we at Oxford Archaeology have been fortunate to have the services of a very skilled and enthusiastic work-placement student called Matt Jones from the University of Southampton for the last few weeks and he has been helping up get our basic web-based mapping sorted.

Exposing our data using WFS has certainly prompted some debate, which is good! Particular thanks go out to Andrew Larcombe, who put together a great OpenLayers page, with some nice ajax touches, and a clever mechanism that clusters nearby sites together and reduces the load on the server. We had a few requests to release this data by wms as well, so here is the request for that. The process of doing this has thrown up some challenges, which I think are mostly down to my ignorance than anything else!