Excavating the Hard Drive: Archaeological Research, XML, and 3D Graphics

Poster presented at the 16th International Congress of Classical Archaeology, Boston, Massachusetts, August 2003.

Abstract: Whether running custom or commercial software, computers play an increasingly important role in the recording of textual, graphic, and spatial data on archaeological excavations. However, the data are often compromised by the proprietary formats in which they are stored. Such formats are not archival, and they pose problems for information retrieval. The problems are surmountable within the controlled and limited environment of an active excavation. But outside these confines, the formats become unwieldy and an impediment to large and diverse data sets like those created through federation. The development of federated data sets requires data to conform to a standard. International standards are already advanced for electronic texts that have a history of SGML, and more recently XML, applications. Consequently text passages can be indexed and selectively retrieved from large, tagged corpora. In contrast, the application of XML to standards-based 3D graphics files is immature. Similar tools for indexing and retrieving select graphic elements from large corpora are lacking.

This paper focuses on the X3D XML application of the VRML international 3D graphic standard. It addresses the integration of X3D graphic files into the Perseus XML document management system. And it addresses the creation of a tool to extract and represent graphic elements from multiple files. The tool provides a specific research mechanism for the discovery of embedded graphic data interspersed through a large corpus, for example, allowing an archaeologist to retrieve every cornice from an extensive collection of files without having to open and search each file manually.

Poster: pdf
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