Julian Richards of the Archaeology Data Service recently gave a keynote about ARIADNE at a free School of Archeological Data in Pompei.
Open Pompei is a European Commission-funded project that aims to promote a culture of transparency and open data in the archaeology profession involving social innovators, civic hackers, social enterprises, with a focus on Pompeii.
Recently the project organised a free School of Archeological Data, STVDIVM AD OBSERVABILIA APERIENDA in collaboration of the General Secretariat of the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage,and the Superintendency of Pompeii. The school (STVDIVM for short) was held at the Auditorium of Pompeii, from 6 to 8 March, 2015. It was opened by Julian Richards who gave a keynote about Open Data in European Archaeology and ARIADNE. Julian was followed by Anna Conticello and Alberto Bruni who described the open data policy of the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage (Mibact).
STVDIVM was transformed into a workshop on the second day to encourage a civic hacking approach to archaeology. The organisers described this as ha(r)ckeology – archaeologists working together quickly and creatively to improve archaeology. The workshop described how to find, to download, to use, to reuse, and to publish data in open formats; and how to transform data from native formats to more useful formats, for example by liberating tables locked inside pdf files, or making web data extraction easy. OpenRefine was presented as a powerful tool for working with messy data – to clean and transform data from one format into another, for geocoding etc. ical data. Tools for data visualization and data communication were also introduced.
The third and final day, focussed on metadata and Linked Open Data applied to archaeology, with the final session being an open discussion about the ethical and legal aspects connected with the open access to archaeological data.