[open-archaeology] minutes from last call - method store

Sat Nov 6 08:55:36 UTC 2010

Dear all,
as announced last week, we had the 3rd working group conference call
last 28th October.

Here follows a brief summary, for further open discussion on the agenda
items.

The next conference call is scheduled for 17 November, 1600 GMT as per
http://wiki.okfn.org/wg/schedule - please feel free to join us!

Ciao
Stefano

Agenda
------
      * ethics statement
      * data questionnaire
      * restructuring of wiki page (creating sub-pages, separating
        introduction from in-progress content)
      * methodology store proposal

Attending
---------
    * Stefano Costa
    * David Stott
    * Anthony Beck (had to leave before end)

Minutes
-------

Ethics

        Anthony discussed about an ethics interdisceplinary meeting at
        Leeds university, possibly involving institutions like EH + CBA
        + IFA + etc etc This meeting would happen sometimes in 2011.
        As before, we agreed that the UK focus of this initiative
        (rather than international outreach as would be implied by the
        WG focus) is initially due to stakeholeder buy-in. Also it will
        be easier to act as exemplar for wider involvement.

Questionnaire

        How do we get people involved on a wider, international basis?
        There is an interesting COMMUNIA meeting in December in Istanbul
        that could potentially give us some more 

Method store proposal for the Open Knowledge Foundation

        This was the main item under discussion given the wide interest
        it has, see Jo Walsh's response and formal request to the OKF
        Coord Group http://goo.gl/TstBq

        Ontologies- the method store could be used to develop a
        folksonomoy of concepts (community ontology) which can be used
        to extend the formal ontology (CiDOC) - usually out-of-reach for
        laymen.

        The best idea we had so far is to go towards integrating a
        stackoverflow-like platform (see e.g. http://askubuntu.com/ and
        http://ideas.okfn.org/ - latter lives on OKF servers and is
        based on open source software) and a wiki. More complex
        solutions like http://www.taverna.org.uk/ and
        http://www.myexperiment.org/workflows were deemed too complex at
        this stage, but might be more viable in the future. Some worked
        examples:
             1. explaining processes for PhD students (reproducibility,
                meaningful metadata)
             2. processes explained from general to detail
             3. Excavation, arbitrary etc (transparency)
             4. assessing & understanding data quality

        Setting deadlines for the implementation of this platform is
        vital.

General remarks
        After the initial enthusiasm, activity of the working group is
        quite low now. Some low-hanging fruits in the TODO list are for
        example:
      * adding open (and non-open crucial e.g.
        http://epigraphy.packhum.org/inscriptions/ ) datasets to CKAN or
        investigating license terms via http://isitopendata.org/ 
      * collecting best practices and recommendations for disseminating
        (linked, open) archaeological data
      * keeping wiki pages clean and clear
      * starting a WG collaborative blog at
        http://archaeology.okfn.org/ 

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