By integrating GIS with the semantic framework for cultural heritage, Arches breaks new ground and enables the system to make connections between cultural heritage objects that might otherwise go unobserved. GIS defines where something is. The semantic framework represents the "who, what and when"
Integrating GIS with the semantic web for cultural heritage
Posted on April 24, 2013 by Farallon Geographics Team
The SemanticWeb.com has published The Arches Project Puts A Semantic And Geo-Spatial Spin On Cultural Heritage which describes how the Arches project, a collaboration between the Getty Conservation Institute, World Monuments Fund and Farallon Geographics delivers a semantic geospatial solution for cultural heritage management.
Arches grew out of earlier work to develop MEGA-Jordan, a purpose-built GIS to inventory and manage archaeology sites at a national level for that country. Arches was designed to be more flexible, able to accommodate any country or immovable cultural heritage institution. It was also designed to be more than a GIS and inventory management system.
The Semantic Web for Cultural Heritage
Currently, many archives, libraries, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions make use of the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model, an information standard that provides a common and extensible semantic framework describing collections and related business entities. The CIDOC CRM defines a common language and conceptual framework for domain experts and implementers. The use of a semantic framework greatly enhances accessibility to cultural heritage information, speeds integration of multiple databases and improves sharing between organizations. Importantly it also works with existing relational databases and aligns with web services.
Arches was designed to integrate the CIDOC CRM. Whereas GIS defines where something is, the CIDOC CRM represents the "who, what and when" in a machine readable form. (Machine readable is key here, because it means that the data definition must provide meaning and context so that a computer can understand the information rather than require a human to interpret it.)
In a semantic data model an entity type might be a heritage artifact, which provides an elementary category that can be easily understood. In a relational model, in contrast, you might end up with a number of different tables such as materials and techniques, designations, descriptions, etc. Each of these things represents part of what makes up the artifact, but with a semantic data model the artifact is the whole entity and its relationships rather than breaking it down into parts.
Integrating GIS with a semantic framework for cultural heritage
By integrating GIS with the semantic framework for cultural heritage, Arches breaks new ground and enables the system to make connections between cultural heritage objects that might otherwise go unobserved. Since the solution is extensible, it also means the system can continually evolve.
From the SematicWeb.com article:
"We realized early on that to do this right, we weren't going to be able to do it by defining a bunch of traditional database tables and filling them up with data," says CEO Dennis Wuthrich. "We needed to think about building an app on the ontology that let people define the kinds of things they wanted to track and the relationships between the attributes of things." With the help of the English Heritage and the Flanders Heritage Agency, which were familiar with the ontology and had the domain expertise, Farallon developed a graph database that represents the relationship of a site to its name, period, location, actors, activities, architectural heritage, and so on. It's now building the forms necessary for persons to create and manage that information.
So, if you have a building, for example, there is a semantically defined way of associating a name or set of names with it, and a semantically meaningful way of associating a suite of materials the building might be made up from, its cultural periods, its location and the various ways you can define it (geospatially or relative to its address or an administrative area). "Basically, you have a system that knows how to track these semantic relationships and how to map between something like a physical feature in the field and the data elements defined as the necessary suite of information to manage these cultural artifacts.
Arches Geospatial Asset Management System Tailored to Cultural Heritage Goes Live for Early Access
Posted on January 30, 2013 by Joe Metro
I'm pleased to announce that the cultural heritage project Farallon has been helping the Getty Conservation Institute and World Monuments Fund to build is now live for early access!
Arches is an open source, geospatial asset management system specifically tailored to the needs of the international cultural heritage field. It can inventory and document all types of immovable heritage, including buildings and other structures, cultural landscapes, heritage ensembles or districts, as well as archaeological sites.
Update Feb 25, 2013: Directions Magazine has published an article about Arches and its uses as both a technical and business solution.
We designed arches to effectively address the following cultural heritage requirements:
Identification and inventory
Research and analysis
Monitoring and risk mapping
Determining needs and priorities for investigation, research, conservation and management
Planning for investigation, conservation, and management activities
Raising awareness and promoting understanding among the public, as well as governmental authorities and decision makers
Arches is an evolution of our earlier work designing and developing MEGA and shares many of the same fundamental strengths including being: open source, standards-based, adaptable, multi-lingual and user-friendly for desktop, web and mobile workflows.
Below is the announcement:
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
The Getty Conservation Institute and World Monuments Fund are excited to tell you about a new, open source software application that we are developing for the heritage field. It is called Arches.
Arches is an open source geospatial information system that will be purpose-built to help heritage organizations inventory and manage all types of immovable cultural heritage. Arches is being developed to address the widespread need for low-cost electronic inventories that are easy to use and access. This collaborative effort combines state-of-the-art software development with the insights of heritage professionals from around the world.
Today, we are making available an early version of the Arches software code. Information technology specialists may download this version from https://bitbucket.org/arches/arches. We welcome you to assess it, and we hope to receive your feedback.
In June 2013, we will release a more advanced version of Arches that will be ready for heritage organizations to download, evaluate, customize, and deploy.
We encourage you to find out more about Arches, to let others know about it, and to consider more ways in which you can assist this effort.
Where’s my stuff? Using Open Source GIS to track archeological treasures in the Middle East
Posted on April 25, 2011 by Dennis Wuthrich
We've been working on the Middle Eastern Geodatabase for Antiquities (www.megajordan.org), a very cool Open Source and web-based GIS for documenting archeological sites. MEGA has just been launched for the Kingdom of Jordan, and we're already hard at work on deploying it for Iraq.
While MEGA does lots of things, we see it as the definitive geospatial inventory of archeology in Jordan. And while that might not sound too interesting, it turns out that you can't really properly interpret, conserve, and manage archeological sites until you've documented them. For MEGA, documentation means defining the location and extent of a site, its various names, significance, and specific archaeological finds at a site.
Consequently, the MEGA web app allows authenticated users to add and edit GIS features such as sites and archeological features managed within a PostGIS database. As of late April 2011, that amounts to something like 56,000 geometries representing everything from pottery shards to the remnants of ancient civilizations such as Petra.
It's one thing to put information into an inventory (this will be a blog post for another day!), but it's quite another to find a specific item in a large inventory.
One of the more interesting challenges in building MEGA was thinking through how to make it easy for the archeologists, inspectors, planners, and researchers using the app to find where a specific site or artifact record in the inventory was.
For MEGA, we took two different approaches to search. The first, and the more "GIS-y" approach, was to use the map as a means of filtering the site inventory. Specifically, we take advantage of administrative boundaries (governorates and sub-governorates in Jordan are analogous to U.S. states and counties) as a means of quickly identifying sites.
We display these admin boundaries as vectors on the map, which means that we can use their geometries to query the database for sites within a given boundary (just open the report panel to see a list of the sites within an administrative boundary in addition to their locations on the map). The admin boundary vectors also let us do a better job (in my opinion) of letting the user navigate and zoom throughout the Kingdom. All a user has to do is move their cursor over the map and click on governorate to zoom that that location.
There are times when you want to find a specific item in an inventory. Unlike the traditional GIS web app, MEGA tries to implement text-based searches in a more intuitive fashion. All a user has to do is start typing in any of the names or identification numbers associated with a site to start searching the inventory.
MEGA allows any number of Latin or Arabic names for a site or archeological feature, so allowing a user to just start typing for a simple search is a pretty big deal. Our search widget is implemented using AJAX, so feedback is pretty immediate and useful.
For more sophisticated searches, users can click the "advanced search" link to expose what I hope is a user-friendly way of building sophisticated filters (both attribute and geospatial) that can quickly return and display just the specific sites that meet the selection criteria.
Liftoff! Just back from the official rollout of Middle Eastern Geodatabase for Antiquities (MEGA)
Posted on April 18, 2011 by Dennis Wurthrich
I've just returned from the formal launch of the Middle Eastern Geodatabase for Antiquities (www.megajordan.org) in Amman, Jordan. Since Farallon has been working on this project since 2007, the publicity and public announcement of MEGA was super gratifying. Plus, it's the first project that I've worked on that had a member of a Royal Family (Jordan's Princess Sumaya) gave the keynote address at the launch.
Below is a YouTube video (in Arabic) which shows the rollout event. At time 0:07 you can see Princess Sumaya sitting in the front row.
I will be writing a detailed blog about the project next week.
