Dynamic classification and description in the IDEA
- Title
- Dynamic classification and description in the IDEA
- Date
- 1996
- Is Part Of
-
Archeologia e Calcolatori
- Volume
- 7
- Pages
- 591–602
- Language
- ita
- Rights
- CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
- Abstract
- In the fifties and sixties it was assumed that a generalised and detailed descriptive system for archaeological materials could be constructed, and that this system could be transferred to a computerised symbolic representation. In the early seventies this position was abandoned as it was realized that data are theory-dependent and problem-specific. As a consequence it has been widely accepted that databases containing archaeological data are bound to be highly individual and short-lived. With the increasing number of IT based archaeological recording systems, the inherent heterogeneity becomes a hindrance for archival purposes and effective management of archaeological projects. It is also, however, an obstacle for a formalized methodology, because researchers end up with pragmatic ad hoc solutions, which often shoehorn the recordings into rigid data-structures. The IDEA (the Integrated Database for Excavation Analysis) is to solve this problem. Through a database meta-structure and a user-friendly interface IDEA offers the researcher the possibility to implement a problem-specific description of archaeological objects, but at the same time stores data and data-definitions in one underlying structure, regardless of chosen solution. In this paper we describe how we have solved the problem of creating a database structure capable of holding widely diffused classifications and descriptions.
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