Preserving the past for the future generations of Australians
Research and Development: Digital CollectionsBased on our experience in developing data grids for the physical
sciences, we are developing a digital collection for the social
sciences and humanities communities. Our test cases come from two
Queensland archaeological projects. The Australian archaeology digital
collection is using demonstrated grid software applications and
standards: the Storage Resource Broker, Globus and XML. The key
functions for the management of distributed data are exchange
protocols, information tagging, physical and logical organisations of
collections, access mechanisms and the management of information
repositories from the storage of metadata. A persistent archival system
can be developed across a distributed system with the successful
combination of the above roles.
Data grids provide archaeologists with new opportunities for accessing and using disparate archaeological data sources. The ability to share data in different formats and stored across different sites will substantially enhance the ability of archaeological and cultural heritage professionals, researchers, government agencies and other stakeholders to access existing data and support the cumulative advancement of the knowledge base of the discipline through provision of infrastructure and protocols.
Database
Data from the last field trip is July 2006 are being entered into a
Microsoft Access database.
SRB Deployment
We are using the SRB in order to interconnect a variety of different
file systems (linux, windows, etc) and storage resources as well as to
facilitate queries of SRB-enabled distributed databases.
Metadata Creation
In order to integrate the collected data with the SRB, we have developed a metadata catalog (MCAT) for these data as well as what will be needed for the streaming data.
Results
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| Figure 1: Query
form to search metadata |
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| Figure 2: Query
resultsfrom SRB |
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| Figure 3:
Information about one artefact |