Abstract

Eric Kansa
Alexandria Archive Inst., University of Santa Clara, Berkeley, CA, USA

An Open Context for Small-scale Field Science Data

In many areas of the field sciences, including archaeology, anthropology, public health, and some areas of evolutionary biology, research programs are often small-scaled and individually tailored to meet diverse research agendas within variable budgetary, time, and regulatory constraints. Thus, these research programs often develop small and often complex datasets that conform to few community-wide standards.

These often informally developed datasets and limited budgets present significant challenges for disseminating primary research data in these “small-science” communities. This paper presents Open Context (www.opencontext.org), a low-cost, relatively simple and easily deployed MySQL/PHP-based system for publishing researcher datasets. Use of ArchaeoML, a highly generalized global schema, makes mapping and importing data into Open Context relatively simple and fast. The import process also helps to address important incentive and intellectual property concerns. The Open Context importer requires that users clearly identify data authorship and ownership, as well as usage permissions through Creative Commons licenses. Once content is in Open Context, it can be browsed, searched, and queried in relation to other datasets. A variety of standard web-services, including “ping-back” functions and SOAP, help tie Open Context with other communication tools, such as weblogs and even e-journals. More semantically rich and meaningful linkages can be developed between items in different datasets through a “folksonomy” / tagging system. Future extensions will enable users to apply semantically rich, formal ontologies and thesauri across different datasets. Because Open Context relies on relatively simple and mainstream technologies, it can be deployed with standard commercial web-hosting services. Thus, it can serve as a cost-effective model for data dissemination in many areas of small-scale science.