Joshua J. Wells, an Assistant Professor at Indiana University South Bend, with joint appointments between the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, and the Department of Informatics, will speak on the Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA), a Web-based project that integrates archaeological data from different sources through the implementation of linked open data (LOD). LOD and data integration are one of the most important opportunities currently available for researchers in any sector, and for cross-disciplinary collaborations throughout the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. However, making data interoperable for such work is challenging both practically and theoretically, and requires that investigators overcome a series of methodological and conceptual hurdles to accomplish their goals. DINAA’s goal is to integrate non-sensitive definitional information about archaeological sites from governmentally produced and curated databases. These combined information sets form an index through which archaeological researchers can communicate and query disciplinary knowledge about the past, making archived data, physical collections, and documentation more readily discoverable through spatial, temporal, and cultural contexts that more accurately represent their origins than a general purpose search engine. DINAA does not store the work of other researchers, it cites that work through LOD standards and provides users with the necessary linkages or citation information to access what data they may in order to further investigate the archaeological past and use them in combination with data from other disciplines. Through DINAA, Wells researches interoperability issues between large-scale archaeological databases for heritage management, to promote broad archaeological data reusability in open science. Dr. Wells sits on the editorial board of OpenContext.org, a NSF-recognized resource for Web-based publication of primary archaeological data. He has consulted on big data, open science issues for governmental research and policy groups in Australia, North America, and the European Union. The lecture is free and open to the public and part of the Cultural Heritage Informatics lecture series, organized in conjunction with the joint Digital Infrastructure Planning for OVPR Cultural Heritage Collections project of the Mathers Museum of World Cultures and the Glenn A. Black Laboratory of Archaeology, with support from the Office of the Vice Provost for Research, Indiana University.

Cost: Free

For more information contact:

Mathers Museum
(812)855-6873
[email protected]