The archaeologists are participating in a project to build a Virtual Research Environment (VRE) that will enable geographically-dispersed researchers with an interest in the work to collaborate through on-line links. The project is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC).
Silchester is one of the most important Roman sites in Britain. The town layout remains just as it was when the Romans abandoned it in the fifth century AD because nobody has built on it since. The excavations are of wide interest to Romanists throughout the UK and beyond.
Traditionally, archaeologists dig at the site during eight weeks each summer and record their finds using paper and pencil. These records are digitised the following winter for entry into the York-based Integrated Archaeological Database (IADB), which is held on a server in Reading.
The Silchester VRE project has three main aims. The first is to streamline this data gathering process, so saving time spent later on digitising records. The second is to facilitate on-line collaboration between researchers allowing them to share data and expertise. The third is to make databases inter-operable so that data can be compared easily and new correlations and insights found. "The project is streamlining the flow of data from excavation right through to publication, which traditionally is a very long process," says Mike Rains, a member of the project team from the York Archaeological Trust.
This season, archaeologists tackled the first aim by abandoning their paper and pencils and taking up hand-held computers (PDAs) instead. Although the excavation is a mile
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Contact: Judy Redfearn
judy.redfearn@epsrc.ac.uk
44-776-835-6309
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
21-Sep-2005