Federated Archaeological information Management Systems
Federated Archaeological information Management Systems (FAIMS) is a National eResearch Collaborative Tools and Resources (Australia) funded project to produce a comprehensive information system for archaeology and related fieldwork disciplines. Through community engagement it has developed flexible, robust and extensible tools for acquiring, refining, and archiving archaeological and related data. It allows data from field and laboratory work to be born digital using mobile devices, processed in web applications (local or online), and published online through a data repository. Means for facilitating the production of semantically, as well as syntactically, interoperable datasets have been built into the application at multiple points in the data lifecyle. Since the needs of archaeological fieldwork and research vary – and because many earlier efforts to construct archaeological data resources failed from being overly prescriptive – the project has developed the core of a federated, open-source system, encouraging the growth of an extensible range of options at each stage of data management.
Solving the general information systems problem in archaeology has led to a system with potential applications in other disciplines, such as capturing historical data during oral interviews or archival research. The information management resources developed by this project include three broad categories of components, corresponding to the major stages in the life-cycle of archaeological data:
- a new Android/Linux mobile platform for the creation of geospatial, multimedia, and structured data, including remote and offline deployments.
- a web application (Heurist) for data refinement and analysis.
- an online repository (based upon the Digital Archaeological Record) for storage and dissemination of data.
This workshop builds follows early demonstrations of the system at the Computer Applications in Archaeology conference (Perth, March 2013) but now presents these tools (especially the mobile platform) in a much more mature state.
The workshop outline is as follows:
Participants in this workshop will engage in hands-on demonstrations of new production releases of software developed by the FAIMS project, learning the system and providing feedback on various elements of design and performance. Participants will have the opportunity to use mobile devices loaded with the mobile application and access online tools for data refinement and archiving. Participants will learn how to customise and deploy the FAIMS mobile platform, which has been designed to solve the general problem of capturing a variety of data in a range of settings. The entire data lifecycle will be covered, from project implementation through data capture to refinement and archiving of data. Specifically the workshop will be presented as follows:
- Introduction to the project and workshop orientation (10 min).
- Introduction to Heurist for customising and deploying mobile application data capture modules (10 minutes).
- Hands-on use of Heurist to create a data capture module for the FAIMS mobile application plus deployment of that module to mobile devices (50 minutes).
- Demonstration of the FAIMS mobile application (10 min).
- Hands-on use of the FAIMS Android mobile application for geospatial, multimedia, and structured data capture using the module developed in (3) above (40 minutes).
- Demonstration of Heurist for data refinement (10 mintues).
- Hands-on use of Heurist to import and modify mobile application data from (5) above (20 minutes).
- Demonstration of the FAIMS online repository (10 mintues).
- Hands-on use of the online repository, including upload, search, and retrieval (20 minutes).
Feedback received during this workshop will be used to inform future development of these tools and resources. We will have specific questions for workshop participants, but also encourage free responses and suggestions. Further details about the applications and services being demonstrated for feedback will be made available in early 2014.
Workshop learning objectives:
After completing the workshop, participants will be able to:
- Use the FAIMS Android mobile application to capture geospatial, multimedia, and structured data.
- Pass data from the mobile device to the data refinement web application (Heurist) and the repository (tDAR).
- Manipulate data using Heurist.
- Develop and customise simple data schemas and user interfaces in Heurist for deployment to the mobile platform for data capture.
- Assess the applicability of FAIMS software to their information management needs.
This workshop is free of charge – however prior registration is required.
Date: 18th March 2014 (Morning)
Who should attend this workshop:
Academic and professional archaeologists at all levels; other researchers who need to capture data in the field and refine it afterwards (e.g., historians conducing oral interviews or undertaking archival work). No prior knowledge or skills are required; the purpose of this workshop is to solicit feedback from as wide a range of archaeologists as possible – we look forward to hearing from users with previous experience of mobile device applications or archaeological databases and encourage their participation, but such experience is not a prerequisite.
Prerequisites:
No particular prior knowledge required. Participants are encouraged to bring their own laptops and Android 4.0+ mobile devices (some will be provided). Video conference equipment would be appreciated (not all project members can attend but they can be on hand via Skype/Hangouts) but is not absolutely necessary.
About the presenters:
Ian Johnson (Senior Research Fellow, University of Sydney) has been involved in data management and the development of systems since the 1980s. He designed the Heurist database system to empower researchers to design and build their own databases rather than being dependent on programmers. His main interests lie in database management, GIS and mapping applications applied to the Humanities.