Benjamin DUCKE
(Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, Germany)
All around the globe, individual heritage managers find themselves fighting an unfair battle to preserve the world’s archaeological heritage. The ever increasing pressure of rapid urban sprawl, short-profit landuse schemes and a general low priority for the preservation of historical monuments and landscapes are seldom balanced off with adequate investments in heritage management.
Since there is little hope that this will change in the future, heritage managers must rely on modern information technology to become more efficient in their operations and make better use of the little human and financial resources they have.
Digital monument records, geoinformation and decision support systems offer ways to rapidly assess spatial datasets and target archaeological operations. Technologies such as predictive maps, erosion and visibility impact models are all available but the software licensing costs of commercial solutions can easily exceed any heritage manager’s budget. In addition, a proprietary solution often involves incompatible data formats and protocols, limiting the possibility to share resources, data and knowledge — a serious problem in a scenario, where no long-term software budget exists to assure program updates, data conversions and interoperability in the future.
The paper will discuss deployment of currently available tools and their respective open source implementations on different levels of the heritage management infrastructure. This includes components to be used in server and desktop based spatial decision support, map making and cartography, document exchange and database management. It focuses on software solutions that are mature and stable but will also give an outlook into the mid-term future of open source solutions.
Keywords: crm, open source, data infrastructures, GIS, databases