Arqueología e Infraestructuras de Datos Espaciales

Este mes de noviembre viene cargadito de congresos y jornadas relacionados con la arqueología: En el momento de escribir estas líneas el evento más intimimamente relacionado con la temática de este blog ya habrá finalizado. El V Simposio Internacional de Arqueología de Merida se centra en esta ocasión en la aplicación de los SIG´s en la gestión e investigación del patrimonio arqueológico. Dentro de lo que podiamos denominar webmappig o más concretamente lo que se viene a denominar como IDE o infraestructuras de datos espaciales se recogen en la Sesión número X intitulada "Gestión de la Arqueología y planificación territorial", varias comunicaciones que podríamos considerar relacionadas con este ámbito.
ver: noticia, programa en la categoría eventos.

Comunicaciones relacionadas con las IDE´s :

"Infraestructuras de Datos Espaciales en arqueología: Arte Rupestre de África Noroccidental (ARANO)"
"Arqueología urbana e Infraestructuras de Datos Espaciales (IDE)"
"Presentación de un nuevo Sistema de Gestión Global en Arqueología: GVSIG, una Infraestructura de Datos Espaciales en Arqueología."
"Servicios de Mapas Web y su aplicación en el ámbito de la Arqueología"
"Documentación en Arqueología. Aplicaciones del Núcleo Español de metadatos"

Bueno visto lo visto, os dejo la url de un servidor de mapas con datos arqueológicos. De momento sólo son accesibles dos capas. Una primera relacionada con una distribución de yacimientos y una segunda capa de toponímia.

Acceso WMS:

http://arkegeomatica.es:8080/cgi-bin/mapserv?
map=/IDEark/www/htdocs/ogc/mapas/ogc.map&

Acceso WFS:

http://arkegeomatica.es:8080/cgi-bin/mapserv?
map=/IDEark/www/htdocs/ogc/mapas/ogc.map&
version=1.0.0&service=WFS&request=GetCapabilities

Para poder acceder a estas capas recomendamos la utilización del cliente pesado GvSIG: http://www.gvsig.gva.es/

Por último, incluimos una visión que sobre el tema teníamos hace algo más de dos años, evidentemente esta se ha visto transformada gracías a la propia evolución de la tecnologías implicadas, asi como por la aparición de algunas críticas sobre algunos estandares de la OGC, aunque lo consideramos como un buen punto de partida.

Archaeological Spatial Data Infrastructures: Distributional and Collaborative Archaeology in Interoperability Framework.

In the last decade some specifications related to the geographic data transmission in vectorial and raster formats through computer science networks have been developed, especially the ones related to the http protocol. The development of these specifications has been led by some Open Gis Consortium’s (OGC) experts whose work has made possible that the interoperability between geographic informatics’ systems take place. The establishment of open systems comprises advantages in terms of overcoming of incompatibilities and lost of information during the transformation process between different platforms. The data transmission technology has experienced a fast development, from the beginning with the first map images specified in html, which showed links that display more information in another viewing window, to real GIS data viewers with the Web Map services (WMS) technology. In spite of the advantages related to this sort of platforms, they are not common in the geo-spatial network servers, but national and regional portals. Also, the platforms related to archaeological contents are unusual. These platforms allow mix information from different servers and show this answering to a desktop application, which allows the interaction with data stored in a local database, or web applications, which allow contacting the servers-application programming interface (API) via the web browser. In addition, the Web Feature Servers (WFS)-Transactional allows general users to connect and add their own data, as in cooperative digitization projects, and also downloading data from the server. There are servers that also have a database with functions and spatial operators and they make possible to develop the sort of work related to the spatial, territorial or landscape archaeology, and even make networks vectorial topology studies through the Structured Query Language (SQL). The effect of these new technologies on the archaeological research will be even more important than the traditional Geographic Information Systems (GIS), because of their capacity in storing the information. On the basis of the OGC’s results, a standardized documental register might be developed owing to the archaeological- data’s register fits with the structure of the Extensible Markup Languages (XLM) developed by the World Wide Consortium (W3C), the OGC, and so on. The new servers’ ability to integrate, share, and centrally manage metadata across entire organizations and the powerful network catalog servers _ as the Geotiff, which is used for storing georeferenced image data _, would allow the development of an archaeological semantic web for researchers. These powerful tools can be used to create a specific archaeological spatial data framework that would improve the cooperation between the national and international archaeological science community.

This paper reports the use of geographic information that already exists in the network in WMS and WFS servers to study the archaeological data collected in the Hillforts site in the northwest of Zamora (Spain). The nature of the data was a point distribution _ an archaeological inventory. The population structure in the Hillforts site was studied using some open source servers, which allowed us to differentiate three different populations: a site that belonged to the I Iron Age and it is called ‘horizonte Soto Medinilla’, another site that came from the II Iron Age-‘Astur Culture’ and finally, a third one originated during the Rome conquest and romanization of the northwest of Hispania. Finally, the application of WMS/WFS-transactional servers to get archaeological data is showed through their integration in a national infrastructure of spatial data, called ‘Infraestructura de Datos Espaciales de España’, IDEE (Spanish Spatial Data Infrastructure).