[open-archaeology] models and scripts

[Verhagen, J.W.H.P.]

Stefano,

Not sure if this will get my reply to your message into the thread, but it will at least reach all of you this way :)

I discussed this briefly with Silvia last November, and as you say, it does not fit directly into the scheme of this working group, but it could be developed alongside it. One of the things that keeps bothering me is the large amount of scientific papers that show the results of modelling efforts, without clearly providing the details of the model set up; in many cases it's just a question of the limited number of words allowed in journal papers (I pledge guilty myself, actually), but the fact is there. Some people take the effort to put their models on their personal web sites, or to submit them to the repositories of add-ons that come with many open source packages, but on the whole the picture is not very encouraging in this respect. And it's not just a question of openness of both data and analysis methods (viz. the repeatability issue). It is also a waste of time if we have to redesign these models over and over again, and I feel it may be an important reason why these efforts trickle down very slowly to the wider archaeological community, including heritage managers.

So, how to approach this? The Atlas of Open Economics does not store scripts as far as I can see, just mathematical model descriptions, and that is not really what we are looking for here. Something closer to the mark in my view is the stuff in www.spatialanalysisonline.com, even though this is a book rather than a wiki. On this site, the basics of spatial analysis techniques are explained and a listing is given if and how various software packages do the stuff described; the recent book on Geomorphometry (Hengl/Reuter 2009) does something similar. It does however not give links to individual scripts or software, and that should be the most important part of an Open Archaeology version of it. I don't know what is happening with the Open Archaeology site that Benjamin Ducke launched some time ago (it does not seem to have accumulated much new stuff lately), but that would be an obvious place of storage for those that don't want to maintain their own repository of scripts.

I have absolutely no experience with developing wiki stuff, so while I'm willing to spend (a modest amount of) time on it, I would prefer to have someone involved who has done something similar before to tell me what does work and what doesn't ... 

Cheers,

Philip Verhagen


-----Original Message-----
From: open-archaeology-bounces at lists.okfn.org [mailto:open-archaeology-bounces at lists.okfn.org] On Behalf Of Stefano Costa
Sent: donderdag 18 maart 2010 22:52
To: open-archaeology at lists.okfn.org
Subject: [open-archaeology] models and scripts

Hi again.

Some weeks ago Silvia Polla wrote me about creating something along the lines of http://atlas.openeconomics.net/models/ for archaeology, perhaps including also a collection of existing scripts for those models.

Basically, this could start just as a wiki page. While it is apparently not immediately related to the working group purpose, I believe that this will help in spreading awareness about open data ("1.
Repeatability, impact factor, and peer review" as was written in the blog post).

Ciao,
steko

--
Stefano Costa

Coordinator, Working Group on Open Data in Archaeology http://wiki.okfn.org/wg/archaeology
The Open Knowledge Foundation
http://www.okfn.org