Articles by Stefano Costa

Starting in 2017, the Soprintendenza Archeologia, Belle Arti e Paesaggio per la città metropolitana di Genova e le province di Imperia, La Spezia e Savona (SABAP-LIG) began activities to inventory archaeological assets through the ‘in batches’ inventory system based on the new MINP standard module. The activity was carried out with funds allocated by the General Directorate and has continued annually until 2023, leading to the compilation of about 13,000 modules. Since the first experiment, the DSC (Archaeological Excavation) authority file, which has been developed among the ICCD authority file standards for a while, but used sparingly. It has been identified as a crucial element of the activity because it can be used as a link between catalogue of records describing finds (MINP, MINV) and records describing archaeological sites. Despite the relative simplicity of the data model compared to state-of-the-art initiatives in archaeology data modelling, still it allows an improvement in finds management and knowledge about archaeological heritage.

Introduction to ArcheoFOSS 2022. Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Open Software, Hardware, Processes, Data and Formats in Archaeological Research (Rome, 22-23 September 2022)

This paper presents an update to an earlier proposal for a standardized open format for archaeological stratigraphy data, the Harris Matrix Data Package, and the accompanying software tool implementation. The update is two-fold: firstly, it aims at a clear separation between data format and the software tool, particularly by defining the data format in more detail and independently from the software used to create or analyze it; secondly, it introduces a new software feature that allows the creation of a new ‘data package’ from scratch. A third issue that was identified is the lack of tools for converting existing data to and from the Harris Matrix Data Package, but this issue is not dealt with in this paper.

Introduction to the XII ArcheoFOSS Workshop Proceedings (Roma, 19-22 febbraio 2018).