Tag Archives: FAIMS

AAA conference in Coffs Harbour

The 36th annual Australian Archaeological Association (AAA) conference was held in Coffs Harbour between 1 and 4th December 2013. Claire drove down and presented a paper on the influence of climate change on changing settlement patterns in the Gulf (which is related to her PhD research).

The conference was extremely interesting and enjoyable. President of AAA, Pat Faulkner, opened the conference and Uncle Mark Flanders did a very moving Welcome to Country on behalf of the Garlambirla Guyuu Girrwaa Elders. Sessions then commenced covering a range of interesting topics, starting with an opening keynote by Doug Comer on “The Strategic Value of Best Practices for Archaeological Heritage Management”.

Doug used his considerable experience with ICOMOS and the field of CRM around the world to discuss pressures on heritage management now and in the future, as well as encourage everyone working with heritage to address these issues in the language of economics and politics, and thus be understood by those responsible for legislation and large projects.

Parallel sessions meant the usual challenges of deciding which papers to attend, but there was a broad coverage of interesting topics, with papers largely grouped in specialities. Highlights were the social media session with 2 papers presented by remote via Google Hangout, with presenters physically in the UK, US and France. The Archaeological Data Management session also used Google Hangout so that Ian Johnson could present on Heurist and Brian Ballsun-Stanton could present on FAIMS (along with Shaun Ross, who was physically present) from Sydney. That session was also streamed live online and is available on YouTube here. We encourage anyone interested in any aspect of archaeological data management to watch it.

Another highlight was the FAIMS workshop, which was also recorded and can be accessed here. Although we struggled with the limitations of a very flaky and weak wifi signal, we managed to download the app and access the Heurist module builder for FAIMS. FAIMS is progressing very well. Adela demonstrated the GIS capabilities outside (so we could access GPS as well) and it was very impressive indeed. We strongly urge everyone to have a look at the wiki, give it a go and contribute to this incredibly worthwhile project! Well done all at FAIMS!

All in all a very worthwhile experience and source of a lot of food for thought. We look forward to next year’s conference already!

 

FAIMS mobile app

An exciting update at the CAA conference was the Federated Archaeological Information Management Systems Project (FAIMS) and in particular, their field recording system for mobile devices. FAIMS is a federally funded project led by the University of New South Wales in conjunction with 41 other organisations around Australia and worldwide, which aims to “create a digital infrastructure for archaeology“.

FAIMS has done an extensive study of what’s already available, both in terms of mobile apps for field recording, as well as running GIS on android devices, and has seen what works and what doesn’t. The project will have a working mobile app for android, specifically tailored for Australian archaeology, but flexible enough to be used for almost any related purpose, available before the end of the year. Prototypes are already available.

What they showed us at the conference looks amazing – a fully customisable interface with, in addition to standard data entry (including GPS capture, photos etc from internal or external devices), options for setting how sure one is of a designation, and mini “dictionaries” of e.g. different ceramic styles/types so that field operatives can pick the closest and in effect say “it looks kind of like this” where “kind of” is optionally specifiable as well. FAIMS is committed to integrating GIS on-the-fly and making sure the whole thing works off-line (which is where most fieldwork takes place, at least in Aus).

As well as an American archaeological database system called TDAR, FAIMS is now also working closely with Heurist. Heurist is a brilliant archaeological database, integrating both time and space in new and novel ways, perfect for archaeologists, and allowing one to structure one’s data in a very effective way. The FAIMS/Heurist combo looks to be very powerful for archaeologists and should put us at the leading edge of archaeological information systems worldwide.

Watch this space for news of further developments!

CAA 2013 was awesome!

The CAA conference in Perth was a fantastic time of catching up with old friends and finding out what’s new and what’s hot in the realms of archaeological computer-ing! 😉

There was a great selection of keynote speakers and good info in a lot of the sessions. As usual the hallway track was where most of the fundamental work was done, although several discussion sessions (including the ones on FAIMS and GIS/consulting, which were incredibly useful) also provided a good overview of where things are going and what we all think about it.

Catching up with Ian Johnson was awesome, his Heurist project has come a long way and was released under an Open Source license just before the conference. I had already started installing it the moment it was released, but during the conference I worked on it some more as obviously having Ian there was a great asset. Together we were able to identify and work through most issues that enabled me to create a working system.

While it might stress out some people to not yet have a slick packaged product that “just works”, I regard it as perfectly normal for a project that has been internal to require some extra work and feedback when it meets the big wide world. Typically this is something (other) companies provide and that’s one of the key things we’re looking at (providing hosted Heurist for clients). It’s not the first open source project I’ve been involved in. I’ve made several code contributions since, which Ian and his team have incorporated. Their responsiveness is a great sign that they understand the Open Source development model and its benefits.

It was really great to see the strides that are taking place with Heurist and FAIMS and their interactions with each other. The use of mobile devices for recording in the field is definitely the new hot idea and it was particularly useful to hear people talk from experience about what works and what doesn’t. More on that later. Of course, as always, the database behind it is absolutely critical and that’s where Heurist comes into its own and leaves everything else way behind. More on that soon too.

Favourite quote from the conference: Eric Kansa‘s keynote, “many archaeologists are using sophisticated data models using the wrong tools, such as Excel.” Over 10 years ago I declared “Arjen’s rule#1: A relational database is not a spreadsheet” which still gets quoted today. It’s as relevant as it was then. More on that too, soon.