Morning all (and a particular welcome to those from the UK SMR community who
have joined the list recently)...
To get the discussion started, can I just describe a bit of background to
the IFA standards and the sort of thing that William and I have in mind for
including data standards references? Comments welcome! The documents can be
seen online at http://www.archaeologists.net/standards/standards_index.html
The standards follow a common format. Each of the five documents contains
* The Standard itself (a short statement)
* A definition of the Project type
* The purpose of that type of project
* A statement on the occurrence of that type of project
* Guidance on the execution of the project. This 'Procedures' section
forms the bulk of each standard, and includes subsections on issues such as
Project Design, Publication and dissemination, Archives etc (the headings
vary between the standards). Each standard is accompanied by Annexes giving
more background on specific issues.
The suite of standards is accompanied by a series of Appendices, including a
Glossary, Preparation of Specifications, Bibliography and contact addresses.
Now, given the short time scale available to us (comments need to go to the
IFA by the end of February) and the limited resources that William and I
have in terms of time for this initiative. I think we need to do the
following (NB for William: I've only outlined this verbally to you - so my
apologies if this isn't what you expected!)
* Check the Guidance sections carefully for references to the format /
content of data gathered in the field as a result of archaeological work.
* If these don't exist, draw up additional paragraphs to be added to
the Project Design and Data Deposition sections in the Guidance parts of
each standard, so as to inject an awareness of data standards issues at the
start and end of each activity. Circulate these via the FISH list for
comments. Hopefully these can be virtually the same for each of the five
standards.
* Add to the annexes for each standard a statement of the desired
content of a digital record of each type of activity, suitable for resource
discovery. Circulate this to FISH.
* Add a new Appendix covering available standards for digital data.
Circulate this to FISH.
* Upgrade the glossary, bibliography and contact details.
The objective isn't a thorough revision of the Standards, but just a
consciousness-raising exercise to ensure that field archaeologists are made
more aware of the future users of the data that they collect. I'm not
implying that they aren't already, mind you, but it seems appropriate that
compliance to data standards forms part of the normal activities of
archaeological work done to more general professional standards.
Longer term of course it would be nice to see a project extending the MIDAS
and INSCRIPTION concepts of defining data content and terminology to cover
excavation records - but that's another story...!
Edmund Lee
FISH Coordinator (and Associate of the IFA)
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Find out more about FISH, the Forum on Information Standards in Heritage at
its email discussion group at
www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/fish/
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