This PowerPoint helps students to consider the concept of infinity.
W3G conference: Geodata at the British Museum
1. Geodata use at the British Museum Enhancing archaeological records Daniel Pettdpett@britishmuseum.org
2. Portable Antiquities Scheme 17,900 contributors of data 640,000 objects recorded 400,000 geo-referenced find spots All available under CC NC-BY-SA Driving archaeological knowledge of rural areas Funded by DCMS Employ 56 people Deal with public discovery of archaeology Started in 1997 Costs £1.4mill per annum IT budget c.£5000
15. Objects referencing place:The Staffordshire Moorlands trulla This is a list of four forts located at the western end of Hadrian's Wall; Bowness (MAIS), Drumburgh (COGGABATA), Stanwix (UXELODUNUM) and Castlesteads (CAMMOGLANNA). it incorporates the name of an individual, AELIUS DRACO and a further place-name, RIGOREVALI. http://www.finds.org.uk/database/artefacts/record/id/49791
16. Have you noticed a pattern? Big discoveries named after place… Place => sense of identity
21. All objects we have recorded 1997 – 2010 Topographical features drive discovery Landowners and regulations can prevent discovery Biases present in data collection eg. Staff illness, lack of car etc etc
25. Using YQL Reverse geocode for WOEID for each findspot against flickr.places Get flickrshapefile if exists for WOEID Obtain a co-ordinate for findspots where only place is known (lower weight for academic use though). Obtain elevation via the geonamesapi (for viewshed analysis – surprisingly good!) Find objects within bounding boxes Query for archaeology images on flickr
26. Problems Hit rate limit quickly – now using Oauth calls to Yahoo apis Had to filter out places eg Copper Alloy, Tamil Nadu was constantly pulled out with Placemaker Took time to process 400,000 records for geodata
27. Display problems Public users can only see find spots at a resolution of 1km sq or 4 figure NGR Some find spots have to be hidden from public view completely – we give a place a pseudonym Maps make our finders and landowners jumpy Zoom level had to be reduced for public users WOEID can give away find location
32. Re-use of OS and EH point data Both of these datasets came as CSV, now converted from grid refs to Lat/Lng and WOEID (and also elevation for centre point) if anyone wants them.
33. Data export All searches can be turned into KML/JSON/CSV/XML (however point data degraded to 1km square unless higher level user) Can be easily imported into Google maps for instance One example is a search for objects by Parliamentary constituency (powered by YQL on theyworkforyou and Haversine formula)
34. Simple YQL query: select * from twfy.getGeometry where name=‘Stratford-on-Avon’; Powered by theyworkforyouapi
37. What archaeologists would like: A database of places – ancient & modern? Ancient place names Dates in use Co-ordinates at that time Affiliation (political) Example database – Pleiades, NYU http://pleiades.stoa.org/ Modern place names
