Ed's three-level system does appear to coincide with what most
people would find logical. It is also the way in which we would
archive the documentation (digital or analog) itself. Such a
hierarchical system requires a means of specifying 'belongs to' and
'has parts' relations, plus a mechanism for inheriting higher-level
properties. It is not difficult to specify such relationships, but many
recording systems do not have a good implementation for the
inheritance of properties. Should we worry about such 'technical'
issues, or is that something for the fish-technical list?

Martijn van Leusen
Groningen Institute of Archaeology


> Hmm, maybe that's a bit more complex than I imagined then.
>
> So are we distinguishing *three* levels of detail of record then?
>
> 1. *All* the samples / assemblages from a given excavation or project
> recorded together. This then might be the level that an HER is
> interested in to answer the question - what work has been done, or is
> available to be done from this site). It may be difficult to produce
> records that are sufficiently details to allow useful analysis without
> something a bit more detail than this i.e. level 2:
>
> 2. A specific sample / assemblage within that collection, all of which
> might be analysed together as a group (e.g. for quantification,
> typological analysis, or flotation to study parasite eggs etc)
>
> 3. An individual item studied / analysed using a technique that only
> applied to one item (e.g. dating of an individual coin, by comparison
> with known sequences, or an individual charred wheat seed by C14,
> conservation of a bronze brooch).
>
> The three levels of detail 'nest' one inside another. My Table 1 sort of
> lumped together levels 2 and 3.
>
> Any thoughts people?
>
> Ed
>
> Dominique wrote:
>
> > Also, are you proposing as in your table 1 of the worked example a
> sample
> > by sample data entry? I thought that we had ruled that out because it
> is
> > too detailed and means too much work for the SMR officers.


--
Dr Martijn van Leusen
Groningen Institute of Archaeology
Poststraat 6, 9712 ER GRONINGEN (NL)
Phone +31 50 3636717 Fax +31 50 3636992