Articles by Claudio Barchesi

Online open access circulation of the journal «Archeologia e Calcolatori» started in 2005. International standards developed within the Open Archives Initiative paradigm immediately offered fascinating solutions to disseminate metadata describing the journal's content. The most relevant protocol for Open Archives implementation is OAI-PMH. Several software applications to support OAI-PMH have been proposed by different institutions and some enjoyed brilliant success. However, in certain situations the deployment of an OAI-PMH conformant repository remained problematic. For small research institutions and university departments, most of the existing OAI applications seemed difficult to implement. In this paper, the author recalls the main steps that guided the journal towards a simplified approach to the OAI implementation, one suited to small and medium-sized archives, creating a system operating now for 15 years.

A project for digitalization and web diffusion of the journal «Archeologia e Calcolatori» contents has been recently started. While PDF seems to be the most satisfactory data format to deliver the electronic version of documents, international standards developed within the Open Archives paradigm can surely offer fascinating solutions to disseminate metadata describing their content. The most relevant protocol for Open Archives implementation is OAI-PMH. Several software applications to support OAI-PMH have been proposed by different institutions and some obtained a brilliant success. However, in certain situations the deployment of an OAI-PMH conformant repository is still problematic. The reason ranges from lack of technical expertise, cost of implementation and intrinsic complexity of web server administration. For small research institutions and university departments the most part of the existing OAI applications seems in effect not simple to implement. In this paper a simplified approach to OAI implementation for small and medium size archives is discussed. This project is based on an OAI Static Repository file (OAI-SR, i.e. an XML file based on a schema whose guidelines have been recently issued by OAI), Visual Basic, ASP, XML/XSL and Java technologies. It has been applied to the collection of abstracts coming from the articles published in «Archeologia e Calcolatori», but it can easily be adapted to other cultural subjects with small efforts.

This article presents a detailed overview of the principal languages for the representation, interchange and exploitation of data, both textual and graphical. In particular, a detailed discussion is made of the procedure of text encoding. The approach taken in the article emphasises the importance of the World Wide Web for data dissemination and the fundamental issue of standards: HTML, XML and its derivate languages are analysed in detail. Importance has been given to the languages that represent not only the characters that textual sources contain but also the structure, content and appearance of the data. Two types of markup languages are presented: procedural and descriptive. A procedural markup specifies how the document should be presented. Descriptive (or logical) markup languages describe the structure of a document, such as SGML. The article considers the topics of international standards as the TEI Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange for the description of marked-up electronic texts and the RDF metadata recommendation. The first section concludes with a presentation of the innovative aspects of the Semantic Web. The second part focuses on spatial, graphical and multimedia data, and their display and exchange over the Web. The development of the Geography Markup Language (GML) is introduced and discussed, as well as other vector formats derived by XML, such as SVG, to construct structured spatial and non-spatial information for data sharing over the Web. Importance has also been given to the virtual reality languages such as VRML, an ISO standard, and the XML-based X3D. In conclusion the article aims to present a broad view not only of the technical aspects of data encoding but also the analysis of the standards, which are fundamental in the light of data interoperability and exchange

The article presents some aspects of the research project which has been carried out in the middle Tiber Valley (Sabina Tiberina), to analyse the distribution of archaeological sites in the territory, based on new field surveys and the study of archive documents ('Progetto Galantina'). The research takes advantage of the positive experiment conducted by the Istituto di Studi sulle Civiltà Italiche e del Mediterraneo Antico (ISCIMA) of the Italian CNR to set up and integrate within a Geographical Information System a new model of archiving, managing and querying archaeological information, focused on the analysis of excavation diaries and their SGML and XML encoding. The implemented system gives rise to a many-sided repeatable digital model, easily exportable in various situations. The integration between the DTD established to formally describe archaeological data and the elements of the TEI Lite and Dublin Core standards makes it possible to record and query data coming from both published excavation reports and archive documents dating from the nineteenth century, which deal with the description of archaeological itineraries around Rome. The example presented in this paper refers to the manuscript by Ercole Nardi 'Ruderi delle Ville Romano-Sabine nei dintorni di Poggio Mirteto' (1885) and is aimed at preserving archaeological information through digital supports, electronic exchange formats and especially reliability of the information integrity. Moreover, it makes an attempt to experiment and develop new forms of knowledge diffusion which are more suitable for interactive web consultation than passive reading.

In the process of creating an archaeological information system of the excavations in Cerveteri, the decision was made not only to use a more traditional database, but also to develop a recording methodology that connects the text of the excavation diaries, encoded by the application of a mark-up language (SGML), with the cartographic data. In order to query all the excavation diaries, an information retrieval application was required, with the aim to retrieve not only words but also specific meanings and contexts. In this paper the author describes the creation of an internal software application for providing information retrieval from SGML texts and of its subsequent implementation on a Web server. The paper is divided into two parts: the first describes the application itself and the concepts on which it is based and the second part discusses the technology that has been applied and the results achieved. In order to construct a querying system for the content of the excavation diaries, both ASP and VBSCRIPT technologies have been used, as they are particularly useful for constructing client-server applications for an intranet. Through applying such technologies, it has been possible to connect the textual sources with the digital cartography through specific hypertext links, allowing the visualisation of the search results in a browser such as Explorer or Netscape Navigator. This application has also been designed to allow data diffusion through the Internet.