John
I suppose I was thinking in terms of some broad national standards for
England. I'm sorry I should be clearer about what I mean (especially as a
Scot).
I don't see any fundemental problems in assigning date ranges specific to
Hampshire, but I'd rather have an England-wide range of dates. All of the
start and end dates are likely to be somewhat approximate and I think that
we should be honest about this. It is also possible within the Exegesis
software to set up user defined date ranges for cultures specific to an area
or region in parallel to the standard date ranges. What I don't want to do
I to migrate my existing SMR data for Hampshire which is currently only held
by broad periods (Bronze Age, Iron Age etc) only to put them into date
ranges which don't allow easy querying and filtering. At some stage there
has to be a compromise between the (arbitrary) date cut-offs and the
research which shows or does not show this and the administrative ease of
data retieval.
I think that we should also be moving towards making it easier for
researchers to know that when they are searching for data on for example the
Iron Age to know that they will get a similar date range no matter which
county or region they are searching in. This to me is one of the underlying
principles of data standards.
Best wishes
Bruce
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Bruce Howard, SMR Officer, Environment Group, County Planning Department,
Hampshire County Council, The Castle, Winchester, Hants SO23 8UE
Phone:(01962)846736 Fax:(01962)846776 email: [log in to unmask]
Archaeology in Hampshire web site http://www.hants.gov.uk/arch
SMR information - http://www.hants.gov.uk/plazst/c671.html
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