Articles by Mikko Louhivuori

The information superhighway, technology has made it possible to create world wide multiple server databases for scientific and humanistic research. These allow a deeper level of exchange of data in archaeology than news services and information about excavation projects. The archaeological information passed along Internet channels is bringing scholars to think together in a way never before seen in the history of the research. The Israel Antiquities authority East Mediterranean Pottery Project is an attempt to enable searches on multiple database servers containing information about ceramic objects in museum and private collections. The search engine is based on HTML forms that provides a platform and operating system independent environment required by a widely distributed database search. The two main obstacles in the expanding of the system are terminological problems arising from language and usage differences and the Jack of a common system for type identification. The suggested solutions include the creating or adopting on local level of a pottery Thesaurus that allows extensive conceptual aliasing between distributed databases and the adopting of the DELTA syntax for passing typological identification keys between different databases. The future will show how the launching of the EMP project will be received by the international community and what is the growth potential of this and other similar scientific projects appearing on the information superhighway.