Katharina HOLZINGER / Christian SAFRAN / Martin EBNER / Andreas HOLZINGER

(Institut für Informationssysteme und Computer Medien (IICM), TU Graz, Austria, in cooperation with Institut für Archäologie, Universität Graz)

Introduction and Motivation: The wide spread availability of sophisticated and cheap mobile phones, providing internet access nearly everywhere, have led to advances in the application of new technologies to support field studies and Archaeological documentation. Established tools include Wiki-based mobile geospatial information systems, so called GeoWikis.
Background and Related Work: The primary objective of a GeoWiki is to provide the integration of photographs into an external map via an Application Programming Interface such as the Google maps API. Such MashUps are both a concept and a technology for merging content, services and applications from multiple sites. Experiences gained in civil engineering at Graz University of Technology made it apparent that the creation of a special GeoWiki was necessary: the TUGeoWiki.
Methods and Materials: As a use case we will be evaluating the TUGeoWiki during an archaeological documentation of Roman stones in churches. Relevant issues include both the usability and the usefulness of this application when being utilized in the archaeology domain. During this study the usefulness will be evaluated using heuristic evaluation methods. According to ISO 9241-11 there are three key aspects of usability: efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction; In order to evaluate the TUGeoWiki against a standardized benchmark, we are applying the System Usability Scale (SUS), a ten-item attitude Likert scale, which isconsidered a valid method of evaluation for mobile devices.
We report on the practical experiences and lessons learned during the use and evaluation of the TUGeoWiki and discuss advantages and disadvantages and possible solutions. Advantages include: taking annotated, geotagged photographs, in a secluded area where the archaeologist has little equipment; the immediate exchange of information and the ability to cooperate with other archaeologists etc.; Disadvantages include the relatively low resolution dependent on the mobile device used; the relative inaccuracy of the GPS location data; and the deviation between the distance of the camera and the object; data protection against tomb raiders etc.

Keywords: Geotagging, GeoWiki, Mobile Technologies, Archaeology