I’m planning to write a paper on it, but until now my activity has essentially been driven by sheer enthusiasm for the subject. I hope you find it as fascinating a topic as I have and naturally I’d be delighted to receive feedback in any shape or form.

Ptolemy’s World map (Nicholas Germanus, 1482)

Boundaries and settlement clusters in Ptolemy’s World Map reconstructed in a GIS and overlaid with parallels of Longest Day (not latitude). The regions to the NW conform to these parallels which may reflect origins in the geographic texts of Marinos of Tyre. If so, the South-easterly areas which do not conform to them may be later inclusions.

Thanks for the postcard, I hear you cry, but what of the conference? Well, I’m happy to report that it was, for me at least, one of the most stimulating CAAs I can remember. Without intending to blow my own trumpet, that was at least in part due the success of the ‘Semantic Web: 2nd Generation Applications’ session I co-chaired. By a stroke of bad luck, my original partner in the venture, Tom Elliott, was unable to attend, but Keith May of the EH/Uni of Glamorgan STAR Project made an equally stalwart companion on the day.

We had a large number of submissions for the session, and in the end were asked to move some into a separate one on Data Management the following day but this may in the end have been to our benefit, with two opportunities for discussion. This was something of a milestone at CAA, which has seen a number of presentations on SemWeb aproaches in the past but never this number or all brought together. The end product was interesting not just for the sum of its parts but also in showing just how healthy the SemWeb community in Archaeology is.

This seems to be for two reasons: the first is that there is an increasing acceptance that these technologies are just a little too big for any one research group to manage. In turn they’ve increasingly started to focus on different aspects rather than complete systems. In communities where there is no need to co-operate with one another (for example those working in Network Analysis) it has seemed harder to get collaborative ventures going, so this may be a promising indicator. Only time will tell whether it’s true but there is certainly a lot of enthusiasm at present. The second factor is that both ‘Bottom-up’ and ‘Top-down’ approaches slowly seem to be converging. This is most apparent in the increased use of small sections of big ontologies (like the CIDOC CRM), as well as acceptance by the ‘just give your own stuff URIs’ community that stable, independent resources that provide canonical URIs for shared concepts are invaluable for linking data.

All the papers were interesting, but some highlights for me included:

- Sebastian Heath, who’s been one of the pioneers of making data available as URIs saying that, for him, the great moment is when you get ‘unexpected value’, i.e. when someone else uses your stuff in a way you had never even imagined. To me, that’s that’s the true spirit of scholarship.

- Ian Johnson‘s team at University of Sydney Archaeological Computing Lab have been working on system called Heurist that seems to be effectively triples-based. Even more exciting to me was the theoretical work done by Cathy Campbell on describing time periods. If they could create a GeoNames-like service out of it I’d want it in my stocking this Christmas.

- Kate Byrne reminding us that it is ‘better to be correct than complete’. I’m increasingly of the view that ‘correctness’ is over-rated too but it certainly is vital to recall that all Semantic data is inherently incomplete (as is all archaeological data). The less of it that is inaccurate however, the less fuzzy our aggregated view of the past will be.

- Robert Kummer‘s point that ‘users don’t want a record, they want to understand a historical topic’. If the SemWeb approach is going to work at all, we still need to do a lot of work in this area.

- Although it wasn’t actually in either of the sessions above, my vote for best idea of the conference goes to Julian Richards‘ suggestion that there should be an annual prize for best reuse of archaeological data. Currently the discipline still seems too often focussed on new results and this would be a great way to encourage both data contributors and and analysts to come back to the ‘data mountain’ we continue to accumulate.

I guess it’s not too vain to add that the importance of making it quick and easy (as in ‘one rainy afternoon’) for archaeologists to create Linked Data from their own datasets was the key take-home message of my presentation (whether any one wanted to take it home is for them to say )

There was plenty more besides but we’re hoping to publish as many of the papers collectively as possible so updates will follow. Please also note that we intend to keep the conversation going over at the Graph of Ancient World Data (GAWD) Google Group so come on over and join us. Other than the SemWeb sessions, I was also very interested in developments over at Digital Antiquity, and of course ArchCamp 7 rocked the house as well. I also joined the CAA Steering Committee so as Student and Low Income rep so if you want any points raised, drop me a line.

Happy Easter all!

We’ve been very fortunate in getting some seriously heavyweight speakers, but more importantly we’re hoping to see this as a two-way street. There is important work going on in both fields which can illuminate and inspire the other. For me, the crux of the whole event will be the sessions which bring people and ideas together – speed-dating, posters and lightning talks. I’m a big enthusiast of BarCamps (and in particular, Antiquist‘s very own ArchCamp) but here we’re trying something slightly more formalised and hi-octane. With luck, there’ll be enough happening in two days to keep people reflecting on it for months afterwards.

Please consider submitting something and if you’re in a Humanities or Computing department, pass the word on!

The Semantic Web: 2nd Generation Applications

Chairs: Leif Isaksen, University of Southampton, United Kingdom, and
Tom Elliott, Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York
University, USA

Abstract:

Semantic Web technologies are increasingly touted as a potential
solution to the data integration and silo problems which are ever more
prevalent in digital archaeology. On other hand, there is still much
work to be done establishing best practices and useful tools. Now that
a number of projects have been undertaken by interdisciplinary
partnerships with Computer Science departments, it is time to start
drawing together the lessons learned from them in order to begin
creating second generation applications. These are likely to move away
from (or at least complement) the monolithic and large-scale
‘semanticization’ projects more appropriate to the museums community.
In their place we will need light-weight and adaptable methodologies
more suited to the time and cash-poor realities of contemporary
archaeology.

This session will be a forum in which to present current work,
appraise previous projects, identify best practices and look for
collaborative opportunities. Papers are invited which explore the use
of any Semantic technologies in archaeology – especially those
recommended by the W3C: RDF(S), OWL and SKOS. Subject matter may be
either abstract or with reference to a particular project but in
either case should seek to engage with the unique technical challenges
in this area. The target audience will have at least some previous
experience in this field so a reasonably high level of technical
discussion is expected. Specific areas of interest include (but are
not restricted to):

* The role of the CIDOC-CRM as a domain ontology in archaeology
* Integrating live legacy databases
* Ontology mapping and alignment
* Spatial and temporal semantics
* Barriers to uptake amongst non-IT professionals
* Top-down (e.g. ontology-based) vs. bottom up (e.g. RDF/a-based) approaches
* CoolURIs and stable web dissemination
* Coreferencing
* Triple- and quad-stores
* Trust, authentication and reification
* Semi-antics: integration with RSS/Atom and Web 2.0 technologies
* Visualization and interfaces

Technical demonstrations are also welcomed. The session will conclude
with time for general discussion and debate.

The former was a real eye-opener in a lot of ways. My background is in theatre, philosophy and archaeology, so I’ve always assumed Athens was pretty much built for me. Fortunately it didn’t disappoint. If sitting on top of the Areopagus at sundown with a couple of tinnies can’t bring the philosopher out in you, your days have run their course. The National Museum is a candy box of eye-popping archaeological delights (shame about the website), and, well I guess I’ll just have to take in a show next time.

The conference itself was one of the most stimulating I’ve attended in a while. As a mixture of Greek cultural heritage professionals and a more international group of invited digital specialists, the division between open and closed world views was starkly drawn. Inspired by the location to draw a gratuitous athenian analogy, I dubbed the competing factions the ‘new platonists’ and the ‘new socratics’. The platonists hold the view that there is some kind of objective value in culture that needs to be identified, nurtured and above all protected from the more philistine elements of globalistion. This can only be done by an elite professional class of curators (priests?) and academics (philosophers?). Meanwhile, the socratics see our role as entirely different – it is not our duty to protect, but rather to provoke, undermine and play with the narratives and interpretations we all normally take for granted.

Of course, we are all a mixture of both these tendencies, but depending on context one side or the other tends to play out. I was flying the flag of the socratics on this occasion, but similar arguments were levelled in excellent papers by (in no particular order) Stuart Eve, Eric Kansa, Stefano Costa, Kostas Arvanitis, Anna Simandiraki, Gregory Paschalidis and Christos Galanis. On the other side we heard about the need to protect culture from ‘globalisation’, the danger of putting archaeological data online where the public can see it (DVD is the preferred medium because you can make it look like a book), and the honest, and difficult, question as to whether countries with deeply contested histories can risk supporting multicultural perspectives in public museums.

Some interesting (and unexpected) light was thrown on that question by Greg Crane at the TEI meeting. The answer to the question ‘who is the most important classicist of the 20th Century?’ is arguably: The Ayatollah Khomeini. Prior to the 1979 revolution he was a political philosopher specialising in the Athenian philosophers. Apparently the Islamic Republic of Iran, as the name implies, is founded largely on the principles of Plato’s Republic. Can it be that the strongest argument against the greatest defence of paternalism in history is that same theory played out for real? The following day at the CRM-SIG, Greg raised the other big question close to my heart – How can we ask the big questions of Antiquity? We are finally in an era when our research is no longer limited to the amount that a human being can read (and recall) in a lifetime. The information deluge and the tools developed to deal with it have completely changed the ballgame. I would add that not only must we start to ask new questions but we can no longer answer the old ones. In the Googlepoch information is produced too quickly, and the gaps in our knowledge are too apparent, for us ever to feel completely sure of ourselves again.

And I’m not sure that’s a bad thing.

PS A recent blessay on language by Stephen Fry captures the spirit of what I mean far better than I ever can.

I’ll also be popping into AIAC in case anyone’s around…

The first, courtesy of Lisa Spiro, is a nice piece of research which perfectly illustrates the point I made in the Athens Paper: New Media sources (in this case, Wikipedia) look set to increasingly compete with traditional ones, even in academia. Why and what this might mean for the future are things she discusses in a thoughtful and interesting post.

This makes it all the more encouraging that Internet Archaeology are once again using the power of their format to do something interesting. The beauty of a Web resource is that they can mash up their own content to make it easier for users to find just what they want – something particularly valuable in a journal with such a wide remit. In this case they’ve gathered together all their Roman papers, but they say it’s “the first of what we hope to be many themed content pages”. I certainly hope so too But hey, that’s still only broken down by themes that the IA editorial committee find interesting. How about a Tag cloud of keywords? or even (whisper it low) community tagging…?

Oh, and two other niggles, guys: 1) Breaking papers into sections is fine for the web but a real drag when all you want to do is print it out and read it over a cup of tea. Surely a PDF download is easy to create for most of the articles? 2) Like a lot of other folks, Zotero RDF has revolutionised my citing. Or at least it has for IT texts – one search, one click and I have all the details. Sadly, Archaeology has lumbered along behind as ever and I almost inevitably have to type in citations by hand. Perhaps IA could lead the way in this too? Don’t take this as a whinge though – you’re still my favourite Arch/IT journal

In a nutshell, I argue that our current pussy-footing around in the heritage sector when it comes web dissemination is ultimately self defeating: culture carries on regardless, with or without us. Fears about plagiarism, misinformation, general idiocy, etc. etc. etc. have been levelled at every other medium out there pretty much since the dawn of history (and remember how everyone thought people would use MySpace and Facebook to lie about themselves? Now we worry that people are telling each other too much…) There’s a little bit about the SemWeb too, but the session is on Web 2.0 so I’ve limited that to a single point about URIs.

In the spirit of keynotes, I’ve tried to be a little provocative without going outside the bounds of what I actually believe. I only hope I’m not opening Pandora’s…well, you know what I mean