Supporting the workflow of archaeo-related sciences by providing storage, sharing, analysis, and retrieval methods
Daniel Kaltenthaler · Electronic Theses of LMU Munich (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München) · 2018
The recovery and analysis of material culture is the main focus of archaeo-related work. The corpus of findings like rest of buildings, artifacts, human burial remains, or faunal remains is excavated, described, categorized, and analyzed in projects all over the world. A huge amount of archaeo-related data is the basis for many analyses. The results of analyzing collected data make us learn about the past. All disciplines of archaeo-related sciences deal with similar challenges. The workflow of the disciplines is similar, however there are still differences in the nature of the data. These circumstances result in questions how to store, share, retrieve, and analyze these heterogeneous and distributed data. The contribution of this thesis is to support archaeologists and bioarchaeologists in their work by providing methods following the archaeo-related workflow which is split in five main parts. Therefore, the first part of this thesis describes the xBook framework that has been developed to gather and store archaeological data. It allows creating several database applications to provide necessary features for the archaeo-related context. The second part deals with methods to share information, collaborate with colleagues, and retrieve distributed data of cohesive archaeological contexts to bring together archaeo-related data. The third part addresses a dynamic framework for data analyses which features a flexible and easy to be used tool to support archaeologists and bioarchaeologists executing analyses on their data without any programming skills and without the necessity to get familiar with external technologies. The fourth part introduces an interactive tool to compare the temporal position of archaeological findings in form of a Harris Matrix with their spatial position as 2D and 3D site plan sketches by using the introduced data retrieval methods. Finally, the fifth part specifies an architecture for an information system which allows distributed and interdisciplinary data to be searched by using dynamic joins of results from heterogeneous data formats. This novel way of information retrieval enables scientists to cross-connect archaeological information with domain-extrinsic knowledge. However, the concept of this information system is not limited to the archaeo-related context. Other sciences could also benefit from this architecture.