Articles by Juliane Watson

The German Archaeological Institute (Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, DAI) conducts a variety of different types of field research, each with its own unique documentation requirements: excavations, surveys and architectural surveys. The resulting differences are reflected in the workflows, the recording methods and the documentation. In addition, the DAI’s international work has to comply with the guidelines of the respective heritage agencies in the host countries. iDAI.field is the system for documenting archaeological fieldwork at the DAI. From the very beginning it was developed to meet these very different requirements. The development spanned several years, major versions and associated, far-reaching technology changes. The latest iteration of the application relies exclusively on open source technologies and is published on GitHub under the Apache License 2.0 in accordance with DAI-IT’s open source policy. In order to open up the application to other interested researchers and/or developers, the focus of the last year has been the implementation of an extended configuration interface and the removal of dependencies from the DAI infrastructure. This article outlines the development history, introduces the currently available functionalities, and briefly discusses the data model, followed by an overview of the technologies used. It also describes the development into a real open source product and gives a short outlook on the future plans.