Report: University of Arkansas

Administrative coordination
The University of Arkansas (Uark) serves as the “prime contractor” for the current Mellon grant. Upon the award sub-contracts were executed with Arizona State University, the Pennsylvania State University, Statistical Research, Inc. and Washington State University. Additionally, Uark is the lead and fiscal agent for travel arrangements for the February meeting in Santa Fe.

Web development and hosting
The Uark has been responsible for the development, management and hosting of he consortium web site archaeoinformatics.org. The site currently provides background information on the initiative including the objectives, current status, participants and a substantial amount of relevant information including a number of key publications (and links) to relevant articles and books  as well as an archive of the consortium’s virtual lecture series (see below).  As of Jan 31st the video files of the lectures had been downloaded in aggregate 268 times. 

Virtual Lecture Series
The Uark has been responsible for the organization and operation of the Consortium’s Virtual Lecture series.   The series began on March 26, 2007, prior to the grant award.  The website has streaming video of the lecture as well as the original Power Point presentations for each lecture.

Archived Lectures that are available at archaeoinformatics.org are:

1. April 9, 2007
Eric C. Kansa
Executive Director of the Alexandria Archive Institute
"Open Context:Community Tools for Publishing Research Data on the Web"

Kansa, discussed the archaeological project OpenContext - an ArchaeoML based system for sharing diverse, nonstandardized data and media.

2. April 23, 2007
Chaitan Baru
Director of Science Research and Development at the San Diego Supercomputer Center "GEON: Geosciences Network"

Baru spoke on GEON, geology's successful analog to some of what we believe archaeology needs to accomplish.

3. September 19, 2007 
Michael J. Halm (1), John Yoo 
(1)Senior Strategist and Manager for the Special Project activities for the Teaching and Learning with Technology group, Penn State University,
"LionShare: Secure P2P File Sharing and Collaboration"

Halm  spoke about the LionShare project and its dedication to harnessing the promise of peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing and the integration of P2P with organizational services to create a collaborative environment for use in academic communities.

4. October 17, 2007
Mark Gahegan (1), Chaitan Baru, Boyan Brodaric
(1)  Professor of Geography and affiliate professor of Information Science and Technology at the Pennsylvania State University
"Sharing our resources, sharing our understanding: Cyberinfrastructure for Archaeology"

Gahegan is a GEON Co-PI and has worked on other cyberinfrastructure projects in the fields of plant pathology, e-education and human-environment interaction. This talk introduced the idea of a layered cyber-infrastructure to support e-science activities, concentrating on the problem of sharing understanding via one layer in a cyber-infrastructure— the knowledge layer —whose purpose is to capture, preserve and communicate meaning associated with sharable science resources. The talk highlighted one such e-science initiatives: the Geosciences Network (GEON: http://www.geongrid.org) and shows how knowledge-level computational tools can help communicate and mediate understanding between collaborating scientists.

5. October 31, 2007
Fred Limp
Leica Chair and Director Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies, University of Arkansas
“Interoperability and net-centric architectures: lessons for archaeoinformatics from the Open Geospatial Consortium”

The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) is a non-profit, international, voluntary consensus standards organization that is leading the development of standards for geospatial and location based services. Since its founding in 1994 it has developed a model process for the effective development of consensus interoperability standards that have been adopted by the global community. While many of the standards will be of specific interest to the archaeological community, perhaps the most value is in the larger lessons on how to build an effective standards development community

6. November 14, 2007
Mark Schildhauer
National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, Santa Barbara
"Ecological informatics: challenges and approaches, and potential relevance for archaeology ”

This presentation described the goals and progress in Ecological Informatics as undertaken by the SEEK (Science Environment for Ecological Knowledge) and KNB (Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity) research projects—two multi-year, multi-institutional efforts in technology development that were funded by the National Science Foundation. Both projects involved partnerships among ecologists, technologists, and computer scientists, working together to develop usable, powerful tools and cyberinfrastructure to facilitate synthetic, integrative research in ecology and the environmental sciences.

7. November 28, 2007
Julian D Richards,
Professor of Archaeology, University of York and Director, Archaeology Data Service
“Current challenges for digital preservation and delivery”

The Archaeology Data Service recently celebrated its 10th birthday. This wide ranging presentation looked forward to some of the challenges of the next ten years, as seen from a UK perspective. It outlines a range of current research and development initiatives that are seeking to address these issues.

8. December 12, 2007
Ian Johnson
Archaeological Computing Laboratory, University of Sydney
“ECAI: The snowball still survives"

Starting in 1998, the Archaeological Computing Laboratory at the University of Sydney, under Johnson's direction, developed a novel metadata directory and distributed mapping system based on TimeMap (www.timemap.net), for the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (www.ecai.org). The idea was collaborative online publishing of cultural datasets in map form. The definition of 'cultural' was as wide as the membership of ECAI - characterized more by the fascinating variety of its members than the focus of its mission.