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ficulty i m having moving that data into postgresql more later jobs for alien archaeologists posted october 16 2006 filed under archaeology leave a comment the science might be a little dodgy no more methane at all what about all that decaying plant matter but i think this image is great you ve got to wonder what alien archaeologists will make of our heavy metals and particularly stubborn plastics though in a time as far ahead of now as we are ahead of the palaeolithic goes off in a fit of navel gazing about the lack of permancy of anything are the big guys squaring up posted october 16 2006 filed under esri osgeo leave a comment there have been a few heads up over the last week about 52 north who have just announced an initiative for geospatial open source software of course we ve heard this before but this time esri are on board so we have autodesk supporting osgeo and esri supporting 52north s initiative it needs a snappy title or acronym the approach seems different though because autodesk chipped in right from the word go by open sourcing one fork of mapguide which they freely admitted was not a core product it appears however as if esri are not looking to open source one of their existing products but to help to develop new technologies currently in the areas of sensor web enablement swe security and digital rights management to quote from the press release personally i can t decide if the big guys are squaring up for an opensource fight or if we re just seeing much more involvement in the opensource movement following on from the recent discussion about the use of opensource alternatives to esri s main product lines and further back esri s decision to include support for postgresql as a database hopefully this is all a sign of a gathering momentum at first i thought this 52 north initiative was a bad thing a dilution of focus but maybe it s just a sign that the snowball s getting that bit bigger more products and some healthy competition has to be good right going analogue posted october 9 2006 filed under gtd comments 2 about three weeks ago i decided to give my sharp zaurus a well earned rest and try going back to a paper based approach to project planning and time management well i say going back but in all honesty i ve never tried the paper based approach it s simply that i have never managed to find exactly what i want in a pda to do list calendar and there is always that low level worry of data loss and breakage i d been interested in the hipster pda diy paper planner approach for a while and decided to give it a go since the total investment see below was less than 20 so if it all went horribly wrong then i hadn t lost much so from waterstones i purchased a moleskine pocket memo folder from my local generic stationers i purchased some 3 5 inch blank index cards from my local art store i brought a really nice propelling pencil and fine nibbed biro and then i downloaded the hipsterpda diy planner template initital impressions the moleskine had too many pockets for the number of cards i wanted initially to get around this i cut some of the card dividers out sorry moleskine there is no loss of integrity with this approach because the dividers are separate card inserts stuck at the sides but not at the bottom this left me with three large pockets each of which held a reasonable sized stack of paper card see next point index cards seemed too thick for what i wanted so i ended up using them for the items that needed to be robust and long lasting such as the calendar and important contact details the rest i printed out on a4 paper and spent a happy hour or so cutting the individual cards out with a craft knife initially i printed way more cards than i needed and didn t print on both sides but when i get around to reprinting i will use both sides and only print the sections i want after a few weeks i think i like it i find it easier to write ideas down freely on paper rather than on a pda even using a sketchpad programme so am tending to write down far more speculative ideas than i would with my zaurus there are some great day planner templates of the type recommended in time management for system administrators i m trying to get into the habit after reading that book of arriving at work a few minutes early and planning my day before i even check my email the only thing i allow myself to do first is change the data backup tape in case i forget later on the day planner is a great tool for combing a daily todo list and time planner hence the name i guess and it really works for me on one side is a list for tasks and spaces to assign priorities and a nice tick box to check when it s completed which is always a bonus and on the other is the work day laid out in hours so it s a small job to map out roughly how the day should pan out other useful templates are the project planner agenda notes obviously shopping list and weekly time tracker this in particular translates very well at the end of the week to my work time sheet i haven t really used any of the others and consequently when i refill my moleskine i probably won t include them is it the be all and end all not sure i find the 3 5 cards slightly too small and the bigger ones too big although this may be mitigated by printing on both sides of the page and only including the templates that i really need i also like having my todo list and calendar integrated and that s more of an effort to do on paper than digitally or online is it the end for my zaurus absolutely not this frees up my zaurus for other things like experimenting with other operating systems or software and filling it up with ebooks and mp3s it also saves me from the worry of having to ensure everything is backed up particularly if i am playing around with other packages in conclusion i m still trying to find the best approach for time project management and todo lists but this does give me some flexibility and peace of mind that my previous pda based approach did not we ll see xml beyond the hype posted september 28 2006 filed under archaeology xml comments 1 i was at a workshop today in york run by the archaeological data service entitled xml for archaeologists beyond the hype i went along because i felt that i didn t really understand how xml works and have to say i was very pleasantly suprised because i absolutely loved the workshop and came away feeling that i d made the conceptual link that i needed in order to understand xml my problem was that i was confused by the idea of a language i understood that in xml you defined your own markup tags and that somewhere there was a schema that explained what those tags actually meant my sticking point was that i couldn t figure out how you explained what something was without relying on a whole bunch of other things that you d need to explain as well how would you explain to a computer what an elephant or should i say an elephant is what i now see or what makes sense to me ie not necessarily the truth but good enough for me to work with is that it s actually more like a grammar than a language it defines objects but only in terms of rules and relationships in a spoken or written language that would be like knowing how to conjugate a verb or use it in a sentence without ever knowing what that verb meant in xml you don t have to explain what an elephant is but you can define that it has a trunk four legs two ears and so on the pc doesn t have to understand what any of those things actually are but it understands the relationship between them because you ve defined that in your schema once i made that connection sorry to those that think i m terribly slow i really enjoyed the workshop what also became clear is that archaeologists and in fact anyone who has to classify objects and assign behaviours to them fundamentally understand xml even if they don t realise that they do the key is to try and persuade people to codify those objects and their behaviours and to get them all to use the same language schema to describe them there are some schemas available in archaeology in the uk the best known is midas xml but there s also archaeoml some people have argued that they don t go far enough partly because there isn t enough formalisation of terms of reference such as for colours to paraphrase a colleague s analogy the colour black has a completely different meaning if you are in greyscale monochrome or full colour however i can t believe that these issues haven t been considered before and in fact most can be avoided by ensuring that everyone uses and understands a common vocabulary midas xml which is the schema i am most familar with comes with a set of thesauri and word lists that should help get around this issue and if in doubt there are much larger models that we can call upon one of the most interesting presentations that i attended today was about the tei or text encoding initiative which aims to provide a toolkit for encoding literary texts and other information for online use pretty much everybody present at the talk could immediately see a use for this in dealing with archaeological grey literature this is the huge mass of unpublished reports that commercial archaeolgical units produce each year it is a notoriously difficult resource to quantify let alone search as most units have neither the time or the money to make this information available in any sensible form currently the job of trying to quantify this resource falls to the archaeolgical investigations project based at bournemouth university i can quite understand why the aip need to exist but currently their main method of data collection is to send people to visit units and read all of their reports for a year and type the data into a database they need to do this because they can then have a consistent method of recording the pertinent details about a site and what was found separately from the remit of the unit which is to fulfil the terms of the archaeological brief if units could be persuaded to adopt a common schema and methodology for marking up their reports as the tei has demonstrated then surely this need to actually go and visit every unit in the country could be avoided after all broadband is a lot cheaper than train tickets marking up content does take time and would add to the cost of each project but presumably this could be offset somehow by the cost savings on the aip project for english heritage none of this is rocket science i m well aware of that it s just getting enough people on board and coming up with a way forward that we re all happy with geomaticians of the uk unite posted september 21 2006 filed under foss4g osgeo comments 2 at foss4g last week my colleagues and i got chatting with the folks from osgeo it was difficult not to given that they played such a huge part in organising the conference anyhow we identified that it would be a good idea to set up a uk local chapter to provide a uk specific focus and slant on the work that osgeo are doing the kind of things we might look at include providing a first port of call to newcomers to the world of geomatics in the uk with a particular focus on the open source tools available providing a focus for lobbying for public access to geodata you know the stuff we ve paid for with our taxes but have to pay again to use what we need at the moment is expressions of interest enough signatures will convince the board that such a chapter would be worth setting up we only have a few names at the moment mainly because we only started canvassing this week so if you feel you could sign up then pop on over to the wiki and add your name for more information on local chapters here s the place to look what we are also trying to do is come up with a manifesto for the group if you have something to contribute to this then please feel free that s what wikis are for after all if you re into archaeology regardless of whether or not you re in the uk but you are interested in open source applications or open standards in archaeology then we re also investigating the level of interest in an archaeology special interest group again at the moment we just need expressions of interest and ideas cool examples of neogeography posted september 20 2006 filed under neogeography leave a comment back from switzerland after the foss4g conference and a weekend in geneva whew geneva would perhaps have been more enjoyable if our hotel wasn t on a street having an all weekend party complete with blaring music pink floyd and reggae mix one night slipknot or similar the next anyhow we got about went out to cern and visited the united nations and even took in a little archaeology at st peter s cathedral the end sessions of foss4g have been pretty well commented on elsewhere and i don t have much to add except that i want to add my congratulations to markus neteler from grass for winning the sol katz award and to say that the whole conference was extremely interesting inspiring and enjoyable i came across some great examples of what we perhaps have to call neogeography today from the beautiful and a little scary information aesthetics they are all examples of using maps to display statistical information and prove what all geomatics types know which is that maps are a very effective way of getting statistical information across with maximum impact and they can be visually attractive too breathing earth real time geographical radio topix forum activity map i particularly like this one as it has some similarities with the mapchat application that i blogged about from foss4g last week older entries search for new posts feed www archaeogeek com moving to my own domain forget long term access we re struggling with the short term minor triumphs major hassles jobs for alien archaeologists are the big guys squaring up going analogue xml beyond the hype geomaticians of the uk unite cool examples of neogeography comments feed comment on www archaeogeek com by nelsonreeves60166 comment on geomaticians of the uk unite by buittebuild comment on bookshelf by bo gabrielson comment on xml beyond the hype by moummakem comment on forget long term access we re struggling with the short term by slimly comment on geomaticians of the uk unite by emma comment on hurrah for autodesk sort of by computing gis and archaeology in the uk cool examples of neogeography comment on forget long term access we re struggling with the short term by computing gis and archaeology in the uk comment on going analogue by archaeogeek comment on going analogue by leifuss archives november 2006 october 2006 september 2006 categories archaeology databases esri flickr foss4g geotagging gtd mapguide open source metadata neogeography osgeo sdi uncategorized xml recent posts www archaeogeek com moving to my own domain forget long term access we re struggling with the short term minor triumphs major hassles jobs for alien archaeologists my del icio us create a free website or blog 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