Andy,
On spatially integrating other data sets: the FISH toolkit provides a
protocol (The HEP - Heritage Exchange Protocol) that allows spatial
searches of remote data stores; it is designed to allow a site like yours
to query transparently a multitude of heterogeneous HEP services, and
deliver to the user an amalgamated list of adjacent or nearby sites. You
can learn more about the Toolkit from Ed, Jason, or me.
A second, complementary approach that we do is to tie a WMS (Web Map
Service) connector onto a spatial dataset: instead of returning textual
information such as parish, county, or gridref, a WMS service returns a
map of sites, optionally with a transparent background allowing the
overlying of many of these images into one, which you can then overlay on
your own maps or data. The WMS is an Open GIS protocol, so it is open,
common, accessible, and very well conceived.
TB
--
Dr Tyler Bell
Technical Director
Oxford ArchDigital Ltd.
http://oxarchdigital.com
On Sat, 17 Apr 2004 01:04:12 +0100, Andy Burnham <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
> Hello,
> We are not an SMR but a public resource of getting on for 10,000 records
> and 6000 photos run entirely by amateurs where anyone can contribute,
> and indeed many hundreds of enthusiasts do. We have completely open
> access for anyone to post comments and questions.
>
> In our experience 99% of 'the public' take contributions very seriously,
> we get the odd screwball publicising their own wacky theories and hardly
> one abusive or offensive post I can think of. It is a lot of work to
> keep on top of though, currently administered by about 5 of us.
>
> People submit their own photos of prehistoric sites of all sorts (also
> notable wells, symbol stones, ancient crosses) . These go through an
> approval process to allow our picture editor to filter out the 10th
> photo of Wayland's Smithy from the same angle. keep the quality up and
> avoid anything offensive
>
> It's worth mentioning that I'm very keen to get work out how we could do
> geographic lookups from our pages to refernence entries in the real
> county SMR/NMR/any other relevant datasets.
>
> You can see the icons with links to various places on a typical page
> here:
> http://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=174
>
> You may well get people with a grudge against their local council over
> planning etc but we have a very positive experience of 'the public' -
> they even contribute to keep us running as we run totally without
> funding of any sort apart from our little online shop.
> Cheers,
> Andy.
>
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> http://www.megalithic.co.uk
> The huge ancient site database with maps, news, community features
> "a wonderful guide" - the New York Times
> "useful, fun, and accurate" - Archaeology Magazine
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