[ckan4rdm] DART open archaeology data repository

Mon Aug 19 14:59:34 UTC 2013

Dear All,

I'm Ant Beck (a very new member  <5 minutes old). Mark Wainwright 
suggested I re-post a message I sent through to the Open Archaeology 
mailing list concerning DART: an open science heritage remote sensing 
project. The message is below.

I look forward to hearing about your project, initiatives and ways in 
which we can collaborate to improve the research process and access to 
to research outputs.

Best wishes

Ant

<snip>
....... I thought it timely to share our new CKAN repository with you: 
http://dartportal.leeds.ac.uk/

It currently hosts all of the data for the DART project: 
http://dartproject.info/

The repository hosts over 1tb of data under open licences. We have 
developed an automated ingest sequence that adds rich metadata to each 
of the resources in the collection. The repository itself is CKAN from 
the OKF. It employs the OAI-PMH plugin (which needs some tweaking) and 
we are in discussions with the Archaeology Data Service (ADS) about the 
practicalities of harvesting this data and in the future expect this to 
go out to other organisations (Europeana, etc.). I also hope to secure 
longer term support from the University of Leeds which may mean 
attributing DOIs to each of the resources so that if they are relocated 
in the future the DOI will be maintained as a constant identifier (we 
may migrate the data over to FigShare/ADS etc. if longer term support 
can't be found).

As the data (please note some is zipped) is openly exposed we can build 
processing scripts pointing directly at the resources. This allow us to 
share our processing, analysis and visualization scripts with the 
community which should kick start some more collaborations.

I am also developing a backend UML which formally integrates the 
resources within a PostGresql environment (the database resources will 
also be available as csv tables within the repository for alternative 
access). This will be the basis for a data-mining environment. I also 
hope to use D2RQ http://d2rq.org/ to expose this data as RDF (although 
that may depend on further funding)

Be warned: we are still tweaking and uploading data.

And as a final shameless plug we are holding a workshop in Leeds that 
will discuss the project. Of particular interest to this group is the 
afternoon session where we have discussants (practitioners, curators, 
policy makers and other stakeholders) for an open debate. It is likely 
that much of the discussion will cover open-data and open-archaeology. 
There are bursaries available. You can find details at: 
http://dartproject.eventbrite.com

Best wishes

Ant
</snip>