GQBWiki goes open
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 25/05/2015

Abstract: In 2005 the team at the University of Siena working in Gortys started using wiki software as a digital documentation platform for the archaeological excavation and the broader research project. We chose MediaWiki, a fortunate choice in retrospect, with the aim of tackling two main problems: 1) all the 10-15 team members should able to work on the same content platform at the same time 2) when fieldwork is over and everyone is in a different place, even country, we should be able to continue working seamlessly. This collaborative web-based approach is common, and perhaps just good practice in the mid ‘10s, but was admittedly experimental and, at times, problematic when we started to understand the routine of it. Today GQBWiki is still our platform for the management of data and information, and it also keeps the historic memory of the archaeological interpretation and how it came into essence, thanks to page history. After more than ten years of research on the field, we are ready to publish our results and and release our data alongside a traditional publication ‒ that will be inevitably a synthetic and narrative one. In the meantime GQBWiki is the base of our knowledge and it will be published on its own as an open access repository (under a CC BYSA license) where data and metadata are really the same. From the point of view of digital data, the 2000+ pages in GQBWiki are a handbook case of linked data, with a unique URI for each stratigraphic unit, journal entry, archaeologist, and significant find. A thin ontology was created using Semantic MediaWiki: while this serves very practical purposes and bridges the gap between a wiki and a database for structured queries, it also helped us solving one of the main problems for publication, that is the accessibility of information for external users, both human and machine, by improving the ability to explore our knowledge base, through web browsing and state of the art linked open data practice. Collaborative authorship has been a challenge both in the material practice of creating content and in the obvious distance from traditional academic publication when considering publication, peer review and attribution. A wiki is a different kind of “manuscript”, by definition a multivocal product, where every single page is built by many users, each one with a different background and level of commitment. While internal review of the content has worked well for us, an actual peer review process seems a daunting task and opening the wiki is likely going to spur only minor feedback in the near future. The very process of making our work open is one kind of alternate attribution mechanism, imperfect but appropriate since we’re publishing a living body of knowledge that will continue to evolve.

Authors: Stefano Costa, Alessandro Carabia, Enrico Zanini