Thanks to the KNH Centre for providing archaeological oversight and the Dakhleh Oasis Mummy Record set.

Archaeoinformatics:An information systems framework

for ArchaeologyName: Ahmad Alam

Supervisor Name: Professor Andrew BrassResearch Group: Bio-Health Informatics

It is needed now, not later… Important historical and archaeological information is being lost, Edwardian Records are themselves now artefacts needing preservation. Dig sites are being flooded to make way for dams. Archaeological artefacts are being repatriated to their countries of origin, limiting research. Britain has 30,000 undocumented artefacts.

Paper based recordsThese are the mainstay in the field of archaeology. The above Dakhleh Oasis Project Mummy Record (13 pages) has only ever been sent by fax on request since 1993, yet it is an unrepeatable and unique dataset.

Online applicationsMummy Electronic Patient Record – a Ruby on Rails application breaks new ground by laying down a framework for recoding and sharing archaeological data, that is adaptable, extensible and based on the Rails ‘don’t repeat yourself’ code re-use philosophy.

Modern Data, Legacy RecordingScientific archaeological research makes use of the latest scientific techniques, yet records data in ‘data tombs’, i.e. Excel worksheets, small isolated databases etc. Much of the data it is never electronically recorded in the first place, it’s published on mono-graph, years after the initial dig, and then only shared amongst selected peers.

From this.. to this…. ‘Mepr’

But why? Is it the data, the community, or the IT systems?It’s a bit of all three. The data is highly specialised and detailed, small numbers of records, huge number of fields, so it is ‘special’ and ‘different’ from traditional IT data. The communities still works largely on paper, and due to the specialised nature of their work, isolated from each other. Their exposure to IT has been haphazard. Limited information systems provided to one part of community have not been adopted by others working in the same area, due to the limitations of the systems provided, ranging from the UI, to use of such systems requiring IT knowledge, e.g. SQL.