http://www.tdar.org/
The Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR) is an international digital repository for the digital records of archaeological investigations. tDAR’s use, development, and maintenance are governed by Digital Antiquity, an organization dedicated to ensuring the long-term preservation of irreplaceable archaeological data and to broadening the access to these data.
Data Integration & tDAR: the Early Years
tDAR originated out of the attempt to solve a major research challenge in archaeology — how to synthesize systematically collected data recorded using different coding conventions, across multiple data sets and sites. A team of archaeologists and computer scientists at Arizona State University (ASU), led by archaeologist Keith Kintigh and computer scientist K. Selçuk Candan, initiated this work. Based on a proposal from ASU faculty, the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded a 2004 workshop that was held in Santa Barbara, California. The 31 participants, drawn from archaeology and computer science — many of them nominated by professional organizations — developed recommendations concerning archaeology's need for information infrastructure that were published in American Antiquity in 2006. The recommendations of that report were endorsed by the Society for American Archaeology, the Society for Historical Archaeology, and the American Association of Physical Anthroplogists. Based on these recommendations, in 2006, NSF funded an initiative to develop a prototype digital information infrastructure — tDAR, the Digital Archaeological Record. The goal of this research was to develop tools for synthetic and comparative research based on novel, on-the-fly, ontology-based data integration to be deployed and tested in the context of the prototype infrastructure. The grant used archaeological fauna (animal bones recovered in archaeological contexts) as the material focus for the data integration development. The grant was unique in its use of practical applications for the technology as a core requirement from day-one and in the interdisciplinary approach used. The grant also engaged a national group of faunal experts to assist in developing the necessary knowledge base and to test the system through infrastructure-enabled research on resource depression (e.g., overhunting).
The NSF effort required development of a user interface that includes discovery and access and ingest of information resources. The initial version of the infrastructure and its interface was based on GEON, a geosciences infrastructure implemented at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. The GEON infrastructure, however, was not found to be the appropriate fit for the tDAR requirements, and the application was migrated to use a J2EE enterprise development platform based on Struts2, Hibernate, and PostgreSQL. The interface implementation was led and largely executed by Allen Lee, a professional software engineer at ASU, with expert consultation by Dr. Candan.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's interest in supporting scholarly communication among archaeologist led it, in 2006, to convene a multi-institutional group of archaeologists to plan the development of a digital repository for archaeological data. That group, led by Kintigh and then called archaeoinformatics.org, wrote a planning grant that the Foundation funded in 2007. That planning grant was largely focused on developing an organizational structure and business model that could support a self-sufficient digital repository that focused on preservation and access.
