Omeka Plugins

Ah! One of the plugins available for Omeka is a geolocation plugin… excellent. I haven’t made much headway on my exploratory omeka installation, other than getting a wee bit of info into it (tempus fugit and all of that). I was initially perplexed how I was going to get all my old GIS/cultural heritage data point-data into it, but this plugin should make life easier. FYI, other plugins are:

The following plugins may be downloaded separately and installed, following information on the codex.

Bilingual Enabler
Makes several of Omeka’s core metadata fields bilingual.

COinS
Adds COinS metadata to item show pages, making them Zotero compatible. Learn more.

Contribution
Allows collecting items from visitors. Learn more.

Dropbox
Allows Omeka users to ‘batch upload’ a large quantity of files at one time, creating unique items in the archive for each file. Learn more.

Geolocation
Adds location info and maps to Omeka. Learn more.

Sitenotes
Administrative users can write notes about the site in an an editable space. Learn more.

TagSuggest
When creating new items, the Tag Suggest plugin offers suggestions of tags based upon their frequency in the item textareas. Learn more.

iPaper
Embed iPaper document viewers into your Omeka item pages. Learn more.

PdfMeNot
Embed PdfMeNot document viewers into your Omeka item pages. Learn more.

OpenSim

For the technically-minded amongst us, why not set up your own online world with OpenSim? By the looks of it, it is inter-operable with content created for Second Life, though I might be wrong on that. Actually, it might be a reverse-engineered version of Second Life, if the links on its main page are any guide (see for instance this)

“OpenSim is a BSD Licensed Open Source project to develop a functioning virtual worlds server platform capable of supporting multiple clients and servers in a heterogeneous grid structure. OpenSim is written in C#, and can run under Mono or the Microsoft .NET runtimes.

OpenSim is currently in the alpha development stage, with active testing of SVN trunk versions encouraged.”

For a fascinating look at what is going on in OpenSim, visit Darb Dabney’s Second Life GIS Blog. If it works for GIS, then archaeology should be a cinch…

Pleiades Responds

My attempt at pumping Pleiades through yahoo pipes led to an interesting discussion with Tom Elliott, the direct of the Pleiades project. Tom writes

As Shawn observed, pumping that list of ancient names through a presentist geocoder (like Yahoo!’s) gives you suboptimal results.

Pleiades in fact stores locations for every feature (at least when we can determine their locations). In our customization work on Plone for Pleiades, we’ve tacked on a couple of other interfaces that aren’t as obvious to users as they should be. Anywhere Pleiades displays or lists spatial content, we also provide an Atom feed that’s extended with GeoRSS tags, as well as a KML feed.

So, for those archaic places, Shawn could choose to use either of:

• http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/archaic/atom
• http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/archaic/kml

Both provide the coordinates, and therefore get you around the geocoding problem.

The full text of Tom’s post is here. Thanks Tom! I’m going to see what I can do with those new feeds…

Yahoo Pipes and the Pleiades Project

I recently wrote about trying to get Platial to map various kinds of data. Today I tried Yahoo Pipes. Again, the task was relatively straightforward: can I get an RSS feed of archaeological data - such as ancient places in the (non-mapped) Pleaides website database - onto a map without having to point-and-click each individual place?

First of all, I searched the various existing pipes that others have created. A pipe, by the way, is a collection of different modules ‘piped’ together to mash together different kinds of, and sources of, data. The pipe updates itself when the in-coming data changes. I found the geo-annotated Reuters news pipe, by el80n. This pipe collects information from the Reuters news-feed, extracts the locational information from it, finds out the actual coordinates for that location, and then displays the result on a yahoo map.

I swapped the feed from Reuters to Pleiades’ Archaic places, and la voila. A number of the sites from that list turned up on the map. Now, there’re a few bugs in it. The place-extractor looks at the feed, and grabs the first ‘obvious’ place name. In Reuters, that’s the modern name. In Pleaides, that’s the ancient name. The database that contains the geocoding only has modern names, so things get a little odd. For instance, Artamis (modern Messa), gets mapped to an island in the South China Sea. There’s a query builder in the pipe, so I need to figure out how to get it to grab the modern name, while labeling the map with the ancient name.

All of this took about an hour. I had never used pipes before, and all I really did was swap feeds. Imagine what somebody who knew what they were doing could accomplish! You may view the live result here.

TinyMap vs. Platial

I should not complain too much about Platial, as it is still in beta-testing, and the various bugs no doubt will be ironed out. I look forward to the map-from-rss feature - even rss feeds that are not geocoded can be imported (although you have to point-and-click to get the information where you want it). This will be an enormous boon when you’re dealing for instance with something like the Pleiades project. Their database has an enormous amount of information spatial information concerning ancient places. A person can subscribe to their Archaic places feed, for instance, and get the whole list. They do provide KML files for each individual point, but nothing (as far as I can tell) in the aggregate (and you have to dig down the document tree to fin ‘em). So I tried to get Platial to import the whole list from the feed, and then I was prepared to spend the time properly dragging things into place.

Platial burped, and that was that.

If I was going to have to drag-and-drop each individual record, I thought there might perhaps be an easier interface to use. Platial after all fancies itself something of a social-networking site (you can mash up your information with information from some one else’s map)… but as Gabby mentioned in an earlier comment, what if you’re out in the field, and you want someone back at the office to have a quick map of something you’ve found, without having to register, create a profile, etc etc? Tinymap is your answer. You go to www.tinymap.net, zoom in on the region your working on (or punch in the decimal coordinates), drag and drop some Points-of-Interest, annotate appropriate, hit save and your done. The site gives you a unique URL for your map, and you email that back to the office. So here is a sample, with some information from Pleiades: http://www.tinymap.net/CNztQCq7hlQ/

For quick and easy maps, TinyMap wins hands-down over Platial. Platial is better for more complicated maps with greater functionality - eventually.

Flash Earth

I clearly have too much time on my hands today. Anyway, I found ‘Flash Earth’, a site that allows you to select and display different sources of aerial/satellite imagery for whatever location you happen to be looking at. This link displays the location of Forum Novum. By cycling through the different sources, I found some images that were much higher resolution than the Google ones, other images displayed crop marks, and in one you can clearly see the trenches from our excavations in ‘99 and 2000. Flash Earth would seem to be a handy tool.

MAGIS: Mediterranean Archaeology GIS

It turns out that what I thought was so clever yesterday, was done some time ago by folks at DePauw:

MAGIS, an inventory of regional survey projects in the greater Mediterranean region.

As of today, they have 288 survey projects in their spatially-searchable database. The interface is a bit clunky though, and relies on popups, which my browser consistently shuts down, despite me telling it not too. Platial and my BiblioCartography also have the advantage of allowing others to embed the maps in their own applications. If I get around to it, I might incorporate the MAGIS inventory.

BiblioCartography

In my research, I have often wished to know what kinds of archaeological projects were going on in a given region. This usually involved a bibliographical search on various names describing the region or place names I know within the region. Sometimes, if I’m lucky, I know the name of the principle researcher synonymous with the region’s archaeology, and can search for that person’s published works.

But what if I don’t know these things? What if research in an area has yet to be published? It can sometimes be an extremely frustrating process. Wouldn’t it be better if you could just zoom in on a map of the region, and discover who is working there, and the relevant publications?

Problems should be solved by those who see them, and so, I have created just such an annotated map for archaeologists using the tools of platial.com

The map lives over on the side of this blog. I have created a sample annotation for how I think it will work: I have located a site that I have worked on (Forum Novum), provided links to relevant webpages describing the project, and included a small bibliography of published works relevant to that site. Marking a new site is a simple point-and-click process. You too may create annotations by using the buttons underneath the map. You can embed the map in your own website – and I’d be enormously pleased if you did!

I would suggest using the following format when you describe a site, because this will allow for more effective searching of the map:

Site name, site type

Links to major relevant website(s)

Names of principle investigators (which could be included in the tags)

Relevant bibliography

Archaeoinformatics and Digging Digitally

Archaeoinformatics has posted a number of archived lectures which may be of interest to those who have one foot in the dirt and another in bits&bytes, available here. And if you’re wondering who ‘Archaeoinformatics’ are, they tell us that:

Archaeoinformatics.org, is established as a collaborative organization to design, seek funding for, and direct a set of cyberinfrastructure initiatives for archaeology. Archaeoinformatics.org seeks to coordinate with and, develop interoperability of its own projects with other relevant data-sharing initiatives. It offers to work with professional organizations and federal agencies to promote policies that will foster the development of cyberinfrastructure for archaeology.

I also draw your attention to ‘Digging Digitally‘, a blog connected with the Society for American Archaeology Digital Data Interest Group. They are organising a session for the 2008 SAA conference in Vancouver that sounds extremely interesting:

If you are developing or using web-based tools or resources for communicating archaeology, or if you have ideas or opinions about this subject, please consider being a presenter or discussant in a “Web 2.0″ session at the next SAA meeting in Vancouver (March 26-30, 2008). Please review the abstract below and contact Sarah Kansa (skansa@alexandriaarchive.org) if you are interested in participating. This session is co-organized by Sarah Kansa (The Alexandria Archive Institute) and Julian Richards (Archaeology Data Service & Univ. of York). The Alexandria Archive Institute is sponsoring the session by covering the cost of registration fees for presenters.

The Coming Web

From the Technology Review July/August 2007 -

Second Earth

The World Wide Web will soon be absorbed into the World Wide Sim: an environment combining elements of Second Life and Google Earth.