About MedArchNet

One of the major goals of MedArchNet is to make the archaeological data accessible to various communities, including school teachers, tourists and travel agents, university students and professors, researchers, and public policy makers. MedArchNet taps into the fast-growing field of 'portal science' and will serve researchers and explorers as a platform for international collaboration, while also allowing the general public to share in the excitement of archaeology and discovery. Various portals would be used by these communities. Archaeological data will be accessed and displayed over the Internet through existing tools such as Google Maps/Google Earth and emerging visualization technologies such as Calit2's HIPerSpace large-format display systems suitable for museum and other public display environments. A key component in this regard is user access to the data using smartphones. Interested individuals could download content about particular cultural heritage sites in MedArchNet on their cell phone in preparation for visiting a site, or while actually there. The University of Bergen's InterMedia Center (http://www.intermedia.uib.no) and CISA3-Calit2 have worked together to launch the WUN World Heritage Media initiative that will help make MedArchNet-DAAHL data accessible to the world community. MedArchNet would also serve as the most up-to-date source for 'mining' stories and narratives of archaeological research in the Mediterranean lands.

The MedArchNet cyberinfrastructure will provide secure and reliable storage of data from the field to the central data storage facility and will support workflows for defining QA/QC processes and procedures, including creation of derived products. It will provide authenticated, portal-based access to data, derived products, analysis, visualization, and GIS tools, collaboration spaces, etc., including provision of "publish/subscribe" interfaces for data, to enable a large user community to gain access to data and derived products. The cyberinfrastructure will manage heterogeneous archaeological data from a variety of sources, and support a community of contributors as well as users of the information, using a comprehensive authentication and authorization system to control access privileges of different classes of users. MedArchNet will provide both OpenContent (OC) data and drilldown capabilities to access archived digital photographs and other digital collections that may require more limited access.

The broad themes covered in the design of the cyberinfrastructure for the Mediterranean Archaeology Network (MedArchNet) are described below.

I. Infrastructure Support

MedArchNet will benefit significantly from a number of projects at the California Institute for Telecommunications & Information Technology (Calit2) and San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) that have already developed software for cyberinfrastructure-based science networks. These include, for example, projects such as Community Cyberinfrastructure for Advanced Marine Microbial Ecology Research and Analysis [CAMERA] (http://camera.calit2.net), Biomedical Informatics Research Network [BIRN] (www.nbirn.net), Geosciences Network [GEON] (www.geongrid.org), and Tropical Ecology Assessment & Monitoring Network [TEAM] (http://teamnetwork.org).

Based on several years of experience in these projects, we have developed an approach to packaging the software such that it is easy to deploy new "nodes" in the system at remote locations, in particular, where there may be very little local IT expertise available. The software has been developed to operate in a widely distributed network (national and international scale) and has been packaged so that it is easy to install and maintain from remote locations and also customize for the local needs. We will utilize these same techniques to ensure that MedArchNet is also easily deployable not only on desktops in research institutions and homes around the world, but also in remote locales by locally based collaborators.

II. Data Contribution, Authentication, and Access Controls

The cyberinfrastructure will provide secure and reliable flows of data and automated workflows to ensure that a defined set of protocols are being followed for data entry. The protocols may include constraints on the types of metadata that need to provided, and checks on data quality. The system will have the capability to support a sophisticated set of access controls, if needed, including rules and regulations on who is allowed what permissions within the system. This will also include the ability to access one's own online "workspace" to store intermediate data and results for subsequent analysis and publication back into the network. These tools will be developed at the SDSC. The cyberinfrastructure design must also ensure long-term persistence and archival storage of all the data, since these are extremely valuable data collections, likely to become even more valuable as time goes by. The institutional backbone of SDSC will insure this.

III. Data Fusion and Integration

MedArchNet contains rich data sources related to archaeology, including structured information (e.g. metadata relating to location and other project- and dig-related information) as well as text, photographs, videos, maps, 3-D images, remote sensing data, links to geospatial and other digital datasets. In addition to managing and archiving data in the network, there is also the need to integrate these data and visualize the information along with other GIS and related data, including satellite-based remote sensing data. The cyberinfrastructure will provide access to related remote-sensing data and other data, and provide the capability to integrate the network data with remote-sensing data as well as related data from other museums or other public sources. We will provide built-in capability for integrating heterogeneous data based on a variety of criteria (e.g. all data from a particular location; all data from a particular project; all data from a particular period; etc) such that the integrated set of data can be processed ("manipulated") in different ways, stored for subsequent analysis, visualized in an integrated fashion, etc.

IV. Information Visualization

The cyberinfrastructure will provide a set of rich user interfaces for discovery and visualization of information. Default displays of geospatial information (e.g. site and dig locations) will be provided via Google Map and Google Earth interfaces. For larger datasets, e.g. remote sensing data, large feature sets, we will also provide visualization and interaction via standard GIS-based software. We will incorporate photographs, images, videos, and 3D scans of objects as rich media additions as part of these visualizations.