The Alexandria Archive Institute is now “beta-testing” Open Context.
Open Context is a free, open-access online database resource for archaeology and related fields. It is a highly-generalized tool that pools and integrates individual researcher datasets and museum collections. Funding for the development of Open Context came from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
Open Context has a variety of demonstration datasets now available for exploration and testing. These include field archaeology contextual records and finds registers, geo-archaeological samples, and a variety of zooarchaeological analyses. We are also adding museum and reference collection datasets. Some projects have rich image collections and narrative material, and others are of primary interest for specialist comparative analyses.
To help make sense of this widely varying body of material, we have developed a user folksonomy system....
We are working toward interoperability with other systems and developing partnerships to assist in OAI standards compliance and support from institutional repositories. We are also working with the Science Commons to find "some rights reserved" frameworks that create incentives for sharing primary data.
We would also like to see some of this framework incorporated into institutionally-backed digital repository systems. Thus, we are eager to partner with other related initiatives. We already have an established a partnership with the University of Chicago OCHRE project. The data structures underlying Open Context are based on the pioneering efforts this group. Open Context uses a subset of the global schema described in OCHRE’s “Archaeological Markup Language” (ArchaeoML). Because of this, data imported into Open Context is fully compatible with the OCHRE system. Besides OCHRE, there are several other initiatives looking to create digital resources for archaeology, and we would like to broaden the scope of our collaborations.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/15/2007 08:58:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.