Presentation given at the Geospatial in the Cultural Heritage Domain - Past, Present & Future event in London on 7th March 2012. The event was organised as part of the JISC GECO project.

1. The past is a different
county: they map things
differently there
Mapping and Geospatial Data at
the ADS
Michael Charno

2. Roadmap
• Who we are and what we do
• Our kinds of maps
• Examples:
• Searching across borders
• Extracting location from text
• Organising spatial data
• What we want
• Future directions
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3. Introduction to the ADS
The Archaeology Data Service:
• set up in 1996
• one of five AHDS subject centres
• based within the University of York
Funding:
• initially received funding from
•Arts and Humanities Research Board (now AHRC)
•Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)
• presently receives core funding from AHRC alongside a range
of project-based funding.
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4. ADS Mission Statement: What we do
Our remit:
“To support research, learning and teaching with high quality
and dependable digital resources.”
In practice this means three key things:
•That ADS collect and preserve datasets
•That we allow full, easy and free access to these
•And that we additionally provide guidance and support to
data creators
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6. Our Kinds of Maps
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12. Simplicity is Key
• Web “GIS” isn’t realistic
• Web “mapping” should provide context
and/or a route into the data
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13. Issues Facing the ADS
•Long term preservation
•Usability
•Proprietary technology
•Licensing
•Data!
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15. Example: Extracting location from text
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16. Example: Extracting location from text
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17. Example: Extracting location from text
• KT/AT extraction and CDP matching
Records (3991)
3388 records (85%) – cp. (85%) for WP2, Grey Lit.
• After lookup using EDINA’s
Records (3991)
268 (6.7%) – only 30 with unresolved place names
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20. Grey Lit Usage
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22. What Do We Want!?
• Service to resolve placenames
for our future NLP
• Historic placenames
• Spatial queries
• Historic boundaries
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23. Future Directions
• WMS Publishing &
Consumption
•Linked Data &
GeoSPARQL
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26. Follow us on Twitter:
@ADS_Update @ADS_Chatter
Follow us on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/archaeology.data.service
Thank You
http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk
Michael Charno