Hansjörg THALER
(Italy)
Abstract:
During the last few years there have been many reports and discussions about the development and application of new technologies. We should now be thinking about steps involving the use of new internet technologies to manage and publish archaeological data on the web. The internet is changing: after internet 1.0, static web content, internet 2.0, social networking and of web site interactivity, things are developing towards internet 3.0, also defined as the semantic web. This involves an extension of the role of recognizable and unstructured information via logic criteria such as ontology, the definition and categorisation of an object in its environment, and annotations, the processing and comparison of content-based data on the net. For archaeology, this means the creation of a system of concepts with associated (scientific) taxonomy systems. This requires a common communication platform. There are some database-style CMS frameworks, but these should meet some basic requirements: the integration of geographic and GIS databases in order to be able to create interactive portfolios (interactive shift schedules with corresponding features and finds databases) geocoding, interactive management of all created media and texts, excavation teams with images creating an e-publication, blogs, forums and much more directly on the Internet, but also on local computers. This would enable the dynamic comparison of finds and typologies between excavations in real time.
The basic requirement is for completely free downloadable open technology from the web. I would like to discuss the possibilities of using the software complex Drupal https://drupal.org/ (approx. 2000 flexible sub-programs) which would allow joint distribution in order to promote higher-level semantic dialogue. It is no coincidence that financially powerful institutions that could afford to pay for expensive applications use this free framework. To give some examples: government institutions, such as the White House (swww.whitehouse.gov) specifically President Obama, newspapers, museums, libraries, universities such as Harvard, non-profit organisations such as Greenpeace, technology companies and many others.
Keywords: Semantic archaeology, drupal, semantic internet, ontologies, annotations