Stop, Collaborate, and Listen: Steps toward Data Interoperability and Reuse across Archaeological Disciplines and Professions

Author(s): Christopher Nicholson; Jessica Irwin; Rachael Fernandez

Year: 2021

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Refining Archaeological Data Collection and Management to Achieve Greater Scientific, Traditional, and Educational Values" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeological data collected by CRM firms and academics are rarely interoperable, making it difficult to reuse information. Though most archaeological datasets produced are the result of compliance work, they are rarely used outside of the specific project for which they were created and are rarely archived or shared. Thus, billions of dollars spent to generate data see only a fraction of their potential return on investment. Furthermore, the data that are made available for reuse are so project specific that they are not interoperable with similar thematic data. As the volume of data produced increases, integrating datasets will become more challenging and combining data from broader spatial-temporal extents into unified datasets near impossible. However, with collective will, archaeologists can enact the FAIR principles by creating large-scale databases with consistent ontologies, housed in secure, publicly available data repositories. For archaeology to keep pace with other scientific fields in the twenty-first century, I argue that that as a discipline, dynamic datasets must be advocated for, built, populated, updated, maintained, and made accessible to a variety of stakeholders and digital platforms. This is achievable and will necessitate a coordinated effort to work toward common data collection and use goals, regardless of affiliation.

Cite this Record

Stop, Collaborate, and Listen: Steps toward Data Interoperability and Reuse across Archaeological Disciplines and Professions. Christopher Nicholson, Jessica Irwin, Rachael Fernandez. Presented at The 86th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. 2021 ( tDAR id: 467208) ; doi:10.48512/XCV8467208

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Keywords

General
Cultural Resource Management • Data archives, synthesis, ontologies • digital archaeology

Geographic Keywords
North America

Spatial Coverage

min long: -168.574; min lat: 7.014 ; max long: -54.844; max lat: 74.683 ;

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32499

File Information

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SAA_tDAR_20210219.pdf 5.83mb Dec 24, 2021 3:35:01 PM Public