Harvesting and Providing Gazetteer Data for the Greatest Good
Linda Hill, Geography Department, University of Santa Barbara, USA
Conference Presentations

Gazetteers are now firmly defined as containing entries that have the minimum elements of one of each of the following: name, footprint, and type. There is further agreement that each gazetteer entry should have a unique identifier within the gazetteer that indicates a unique place for which associated information can be gathered from multiple sources—information that may be of varying degrees of authenticity, accuracy, precision, completeness, and time period and different points of view. Suddenly, the simple, minimum notion of what constitutes a gazetteer entry is much more complicated. Given that knowledge about the characteristics of named geographic places is valuable for understanding social, cultural and physical realities and that the sources of this information are scattered about and held in official toponymic files, folklore of local residents, administrative archives, documents, statistical databases, cartographic datasets, images, and scholarly knowledge sources, how do we harvest and provide these resources for the greatest good.

Two approaches can be taken—one from the point of models to organize gazetteer data and protocols to share it and the other focusing on exemplary use cases from which the absolute essentials of named-place formal description can be verified and beyond-the-basics modules can be developed to satisfy classes of users. Existing structures for the management of gazetteer data and existing gazetteer protocols will be compared and other related information standards, such as for thesauri, text markup, and harvesting data, will be noted. Use cases are harder to come by and, if possible during the session, a group discussion will be held to solicit ideas about how to build a set of useful descriptions of the uses and users of gazetteers and gazetteer services for the ECAI community. We can start with the assumed purposes for which existing ECAI gazetteers have been developed and go from there.

Consolidator Technique: Digital Image Analysis for Ancient Monument Reconstruction and Atlas Creation
Shchigorets S.B., Doos A.A., Zhabko A.P., Dr.Sci., Grishkin V.M., Ph.D. , Petersburg State University, Russia
Conference Presentation

This communication reports the results of development and application of techniques for digital image analysis for monument reconstruction in order to improve quality and effectiveness of archeological investigations and create cultural atlases.

During archeological excavations in Egypt, researchers find scattered fragments of ancient stone monuments. Putting fragments together to reconstruct a whole monument is a challenge. Some fragments may be located in a museum, while others may still be kept in boxes at the excavation site or be in other museums or private collections worldwide.

Today, experts sort and match fragments manually. We suggest a solution:

Our software and algorithms facilitate and speed up sorting and matching of stone fragments. Digital images are processed using a program that calculates mean colours that are “fingerprints” or unique features of stone fragments.

While comparing these parameters, we subdivide all fragments into colour groups, to facilitate image matching.

This interactive technique ensures ordering of scattered fragments into clusters. The clusters are grouped according to objective characteristics: colour tint, brightness, intensity. This technique ensures reliable reconstruction of monument parts or whole monuments from fragments.

The technique is suggested for the first time for application in archaeological excavations in Egypt. It was tested by authors on Egyptian materials. As the project evolves, the database and atlas of images will expand and incorporate specific data on fragments of Egyptian monuments. This database and atlas can be made available for researchers on the Internet or on CD-ROM. 

Using the Bibliographical DB for the Temporal and Spatial Reconstruction of Historical and Cultural Heritage
Oleg Rinchinov and Adrey Bazarov,IMBT SB RAS - unconfirmed

Creation of the bibliographical database will give researchers a powerful tool that makes it possible to reveal new aspects in the study of the subject area for which this database has been created.

The study of the territorial and chronological distributions of artifacts described in the Tibetan and Mongolian catalogs of the IMBT can be conducted according to the following criteria:

Thus, by accumulating the information of this type in the bibliographical database, it is possible to obtain the information on the extent of the historical cultural phenomena, their content, and regional specific features. These data can be significant in the study of such subjects as the history of Buddhism in Buryatia, monasteries' publishing, Buddhist religious practices, and so on.

This discussion is devoted to the methods of data mining from the bibliographic database and development of advanced data structures and software to carry out them.

Application of Semantic Web Technologies for Historical Processes Description and Modeling
Vladimir A. Serebryakov, Adrew V. Vershinin, Dinh Le Dat, Ilya A. Dyakonov, Artem S. Malkov

Over the past decade the rapid development of computer technologies has led to explosive growth of the historical data available over the Internet. This process was possible due to the common way of presenting data – through web pages, which make it possible for scientists to find and use the data. Nevertheless great effort to use those data integrally is still needed because of the lack of interoperability between information systems providing access to data sets. The development of Internet standards (e.g. XML) has partly resolved this problem - on syntactical level, but data in different sources still have different structures and only human-understandable meaning (semantics).

W3C Semantic Web (SW) activity is aimed at the creating, standardization, and providing of methodology and tools for achieving semantic interoperability – to make data machine-understandable and therefore machine-processable. It provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and re-used across application, enterprise, and community boundaries through giving formal description of meaning to all its parts – creating ontology, a data model that represents a set of concepts within a domain and the relationships between those concepts. SW include such elements as Resource Description Framework (RDF), a variety of data interchange formats (e.g RDF/XML, N3, Turtle), and notations such as RDF Schema (RDFS) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL).

Nowadays Geo-Information Systems (GISs) become an important part in work of historical researchers as historical processes naturally include spatial component – places of events, context location of target parameter values (e.g. salary or prices). Present-day GISs provide means for storing, querying, visualizing and analyzing spatio-temporal data with wide range of additional functionality dependent on vendor.

We present our point of view to the process of historical data (and services for historical data processing) integration and re-use, description of the prototype system and results of the first steps – geo-historical ontology based on the results of the wide analysis of similar projects. The interoperable and standardized representation of historical data is an important part of the OpenHistory project [1] that is a part of the United Scientific Information Space of the Russian Academy of Sciences [2].
The system itself is a web-based Open-Geospatial Consortium-compliant GIS that provides access to data through Web-portal with embedded GIS-client applications and through standard WMS and WFS protocols making possible working in desktop client application. Besides data can be queried in SPARQL with results in RDF/XML format. 

Bibliography

Note: Wikipedia word mashup included by authors

Methodics of Geo-physical and Topographical Investigations of Giza Eastern Necropolis   (Russian Archaeological Mission in Giza)
Kormysheva E.; Morozov P.; Vetochov S.
Conference Presentation

The investigations on Giza plateau (concession of the Russian Archaeological Mission, Institute of Oriental Studies Russian Academy of Science) was held from  8 tо 19 November 2006 with the help of Geo-Radar “LOZA B”, invented by .Russian scholars.  The area of investigations is situated on the eastern hill of Giza plateau around 200 m from Cheops Pyramid. It presents terraces on a slope, where rock tombs of Ancient Kingdom (second half of 3 mil. BC, 2450 – 2350 BC) were situated. Part of them were registered in XIX cent. however in time they have disappeared under a great layer of sand (around 5-10 metres thick). As far as they were never registered on the geographical map, all the area had to be rediscovered by the mission. Up to now there is no exact archaeological map of Giza plateau. The work of Russian archaeological mission is a contribution to the international GIZA MAPPING PROJECT, realized by American mission in Giza

During the work of the season a special methodic of the work with Geo-Radar regarding natural - positional conditions was elaborated. With the help of Geo-Radar “LOZA B”, diffraction pictures (radio-images) displayed several sections in this area. Three rows of rock tombs were revealed in the investigated area. Composition of topographical plan and checking up the results during the further excavations have confirmed the results of Geo-Radar investigations.