The Digital Archaeological Record
The Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR) is the digital repository of Digital Antiquity, a collaborative organization devoted to enhancing preservation and access to digital records of archaeological investigations. tDAR aspires to become a national/international digital repository for archaeological information, including databases, reports, images, and other kinds of archaeological information. This project has the dual objectives of advancing archaeologists' ability to engage in synthetic and comparative research and to maintain the long-term utility and accessibility of irreplaceable data in the face of inadequate metadata and rapidly changing technology.
Background and Support. Digital Antiquity has been generously supported by two grants from the Andrew. W. Mellon Foundation and two grants from the National Science Foundation. The Mellon Foundation's current investment builds on its 2007 planning grant to archaeoinformatics.org and on the NSF-funded prototype tDAR. The current effort focuses on a full implementation of tDAR and its establishment as a trusted digital repository that will be financially sustainable in the long term. Digital Antiquity is being established as an autonomous center at Arizona State University. Mellon Foundation funding is also supporting the development of Guides to Good Practice with respect to digital records of archaeological research, jointly by the University of York's Archaeology Data Service and the University of Arkansas. The Pennsylvania State University, the SRI Foundation, and Washington State University are also partners in the Mellon Foundation effort.
The objective of the current NSF grant is to prototype a data integration system that allows researchers to extract sensibly integrated and appropriately scaled databases of analytically comparable observations from numerous archaeological databases gathered using incommensurate recording protocols. Query-dependent, on-the-fly data integration will be effected using the detailed metadata associated with databases and expert knowledge encoded as ontologies and rules. In computer science, the challenges are to develop methods: to perform ad hoc data integration where the semantic demands of the query are reconciled with the semantic content of the available datasets; and to resolve conflicts in concept-oriented query processing that arise from inconsistent recording strategies (represented as ontologies).
Using tDAR. In tDAR, information resources are registered either as independent resources or as part of a set of information resources associated with a single project (such as an archaeological field project). Each project and each information resource is registered with metadata that provide the archival and semantic information that will permit their long-term preservation and use. For databases (and spreadsheets), the metadata includes information on the individual tables, columns, and rows, along with the coding sheets that provide the semantic labels for encoded fields.
tDAR users must register and agree to a user agreement but access is free. Those wishing access to sensitive information (such as site location) or desiring to contribute data to the repository must receive additional approval. This prototype accepts Microsoft Access databases and Excel spreadsheets, reports and other documents in PDF or plain ASCII format, and images in JPG and TIFF format. Additional data formats will be accepted in the future. The prototype integration effort focuses on archaeological faunal data but will be readily extensible to other material classes.
Use the beta version of tDAR
Resources
- The Digital Antiquity Initiative
- Project Background
- What is tDAR - Presentation (PDF)
- tDAR Tutorial (PDF) by Michelle Elliott
- User Documentation(to be developed)
- Issue Tracker
- Developer Documentation
