Hi, Yesterday I sent a mail to this list in reply to Peter Iles's earlier mentioning of the Anytown barrow example, but I think somehow it didn't get through to the list subscribers. Since today he again asked: > Are there any Information Scientists out there who deal with > this sort of thing and can give us pointers, theoretical and practical, to > methods of dealing with these 'faulty' datasets? I will give it another shot. Firstly, to generalise from the examples given yesterday and today, what we want is metadata fields which indicate the quality of our data fields. So, if we have a point location for some monument, then there should also be at least one database field containing an indication of the reliability of that location. There are many ways in which this can be done, including simple radii ("the real position of this monument is within 50 m of its stated position"), zonation ("the monument is somewhere within this administrative area (polygon) but we've no idea where"), and probability functions ("fuzzy" locations). I'd guess that all of these could be implemented on today's simple systems, eg. an Access RDBMS and ArcView/MapInfo/Idrisi GIS, although if you're going to work with probabilities you're probably (no pun intended) better off with raster GIS than with vector GIS. However, en users (including planning officers) may well prefer easier to interpret *presentations* of the metadadata, using some device such as the Level 1, 2, etc suggested by Peter. Secondly, it is obviously not just the location of archaeological remains which may be uncertain. Everything from identification to chronology is to some (large) extent a matter of interpretation, and can/will change over time. While this means that an SMR database must be careful to separate observations from interpretations, and to use metadata fields to record the degree of uncertainty in the latter, for the purposes of this e-conference we should ask ourselves how much of this should carry over into the GIS? For example, do you want the GIS to be able to distinguish between 'reported' barrows, and 'confirmed' barrows? Third and lastly, I'd like to bring up a point which hasn't been mentioned yet - I believe that SMR records generally, and not just in Britain, represent only a small portion of the extant archaeology, and that (for planning control purposes) it is much more important to look the *likelihood* of archaeological resources being present in an area. This takes us into the area of predictive modelling which (in the Netherlands at least) is already deeply affecting planning policy from the national down to the municipal level. Unfortunately, here again we must deal with probabilistic maps rather than point or zone (polygon) maps. So the conclusion I would like to submit to you is, that GIS standards for CRM must include a) standards for metadata for locational precision and accuracy, b) standards for the representation and description of probabilistic data. I repeat that there are no technical problems in implementing these, but I am aware that current SMR do not contain such information at the moment, and users will also not be familiar with such 'fuzzy' formats. Martijn van Leusen PhD student, University of Groningen