Wouter BOASSON
(The Netherlands)
Several national and international projects are set up to create spatial data infrastructures to enable the exchange of data. These project have a generic character, and as so are not aimed at the highly specialized archaeological domain.
However, from my experience as a GIS specialist in the archaeological research and as a representative for the national institute for public health and environmental research (RIVM), which is involved in some of the projects, I will demonstrate that some of the generic solutions for the data-exchange problems could also provide a solution for specific problems of data-exchange in the archaeological domain.
The following projects provide examples of techniques to deal with using data from foreign sources, with different semantics, and aim at long term conservation of data.
The NORA project, which is basically an architectural framework for the dutch government to link over 1600 different governmental organizational units.
The European Union INSPIRE project provides a metadata, dataformat and legal framework to make data available to offices, in the first place aimed at environmental research. Finally, an interesting project was the realization of a cross-border water management system, where soil data from different sources with their own semantics and sampling methods, had to be made available for both sides of the cultural border between the Netherlands and Germany.
Formerly I worked as GIS specialist in one of the largest archaeological research companies in the Netherlands, where I developed a new database approach to be able to handle the data from excavations.