Well, at last it’s OK for me to tell people that Oxford Archaeology now has a WFS server that is accessible from the outside world. The address is: http://mapdata.thehumanjourney.net/cgi-bin/mapservwfs.cgi It’s a standard MapServer setup, and at the moment contains static data about the sites we have worked on over the last thirty years. This is still a work in progress and there are a whole bunch of things I would like to improve (but at least it’s up and out there):

Back in Lancaster after a successful CAA conference and Archcamp. Just a quick post, as it has been a long day and other people have been tasked with providing the lowdown on it all. Archcamp provided us all with an opportunity for a demo and more in-depth discussion on some of the applications we’ve been working on, and other interesting things. It was also an opportunity for a visit to the University Archaeology department’s new building, which is very nice and has an extremely well-equipped computing lab.

Day Two of CAA 2007, and some more very interesting talks. A common theme today was the use of 3D modelling in archaeology, but approached from very different perspectives, and for differing uses. First up we had a talk about using 3D modelling as one of a barrage of techniques used to examine the visibility, or visual consumption of interior wall paintings in the ancient Greek settlement of Acrotiri. 3D modelling was used here alongside crowd-modelling techniques at both a macro- and meso-scale to highlight that the paintings would have been visible from a particular pinch-point in people’s movement through a street network.

Crikey, day one and we’ve already had something like 15 talks. So where to start, since it’s all been great? These conferences are good because you get a real range of speakers, so we had a run down of twenty years of the archaeological computing MSc at the university here, the archaeology of Greenham Common protests, tracking the routes of students between two pubs in Cardiff and what that can tell us about phenomenology, using network analysis to study the interaction between the cities of Minoa, using “fireshed” analysis and the location of bullets and cases at Litle Bighorn to analyse the movements of the individual combatants, and last but not least a gallop through the varying ways that the International Documentation and Research Committee of ICOM (CIDOC) are trying to document archaeological monuments and the events (eg excavations and surveys) that bring them to light.

I’m in Southampton for the 2007 Computing Applications in Archaeology UK Chapter Conference. This is always a really interesting and often inspiring get together with a mix of commercial archaeologists such as myself and academic archaeologists (they normally have the best presentations). There’s wifi available in my lovely salubrious Travelodge room, so I’ll aim to post some feedback on the first day’s talks tomorrow evening. This post is also exciting for me, because I’m experimenting with the Geopress plugin for Wordpress.

On Friday I attended a one-day conference at the e-Science Centre at Edinburgh University, entitled “Maintaining Long-term Access to Geospatial Data”. The quote above came from one of the speakers and, to me, it was the key point that came out of the day. Having said that, some interesting themes emerged that align nicely with ongoing discussions amongst the geospatial crowd. Firstly- the overwhelming trend in all the discussions was a move towards a service-based decentralised architecture for geospatial data storage and sharing.

In my spare time/lunch times I’m in the middle of a major project at the moment, to update our site database. Without going into the gory details of how it ended up in three separate, totally unlinked databases, it is supposed to document the archaeological sites we’ve worked on since the 1970’s, and to help with the administration of project archives, the location of finds within our finds store and so on.

I was at a workshop today in York, run by the Archaeological Data Service, entitled XML for archaeologists: Beyond the Hype. I went along because I felt that I didn’t really understand how XML works, and have to say I was very pleasantly suprised because I absolutely loved the workshop and came away feeling that I’d made the conceptual link that I needed in order to understand XML. My problem was that I was confused by the idea of a “language”.

On this page I’m going to list the books and papers that I find most useful. **Archaeology Related Texts: ** Digital Archaeologyby Thomas L Evans and Patrick Daly Actually, this is a new book that I haven’t had chance to read yet, but Tom used to be the Head of Geomatics at Oxford Archaeology and did a lot to move the department forward so I’m sure it will be good (and I’ll be buying it myself for sure).