The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded the Alexandria Archive Institute a grant for the project Open Context: Sustaining a Collaborative Data Infrastructure for Archaeology. The award from the NSF’s Archaeometry competition provides $270,834 over five years to develop and expand the critical technological infrastructure and editorial processes that support Open Context’s data publishing services.
Archaeological knowledge grows by synthesizing evidence accumulated over many years of field research by many investigators. Open Context helps make this vast body of material more accessible and useful. Currently with over two million records from 191 projects across 94 countries, including 173,000 images and illustrations, Open Context preserves invaluable archaeological contributions using open-source technologies and open standards. However, data preservation is not merely a compliance issue; it involves significant ethical considerations, including cross-cultural intellectual property issues and conceptual challenges. Open Context places a strong emphasis on intellectual investment in data. It provides services that transform raw data into intelligible and useful information, ensuring their value and relevance to both scholars and the public.
NSF funding will support exploration of new ways to organize and share archaeological research data to better address research questions about the human past, inform and educate the public, and align with ethical best practices. Work will involve technical improvements to increase the scalability and performance of Open Context’s infrastructure and support for services that promote greater scientific confidence in the provenance and authenticity of data. In addition, Open Context’s editorial team will curate and publish groups of thematically related archaeological datasets that have a high reuse potential to support new research on topics as diverse as ancient trade and exchange systems and multi-disciplinary approaches to understanding human environment interactions. This work champions ethically and contextually appropriate approaches to open access and open data and addresses critical needs in the preservation of cultural heritage data.
Funding from the NSF ensures the platform’s continued impact in both scholarly and public spheres while advancing interdisciplinary collaboration and innovations to make scientific data more valued and beneficial to diverse communities. Funding from NSF also provides the resources to leverage important advances in open source technologies. With NSF support, Open Context will begin making data available using Arches. Integrating Arches open source technologies into Open Context will reduce software maintenance costs and will enable Open Context to better keep pace with new standards and good practices.
