On the 25th of May 2007, Martin O'Hare, our Sites and Monuments Records Officer, attended the Data Sans Frontieres conference at the British Museum in London. This conference was organised by the Historic Environment Information Resource Network (HEIRNET), and supported by the Archaeology Data Service (ADS), the Council for British Archaeology (CBA) and the AHRC ICT Methods Network.
The aim of the conference was to highlight the opportunities offered by web portal technology for the provision of joined-up historic environment datasets to the wider archaeological community. A constant theme among the speakers was the desirability of making data more easily available to different user groups, from academic researchers to commercial contractors. During the morning session, speakers outlined current initiatives being developed within the curatorial archaeological sector, such as English Heritage's Heritage Gateway portal, which provides access to aggregate data from a range of distributed datasets, and the CBA's Community Archaeology Forum, which gives people involved in community archaeology projects somewhere to share information and experience.
The afternoon session was split between setting these current initiatives within a wider external context, and a discussion of future directions in the provision of heritage data. One of these sessions, on Web Services and Data Aggregation, was led by former WoSAS Sites and Monuments Records Officer, Dr Stuart Jeffrey, now working with the ADS in York. Another speaker, Ben Robinson of Peterborough Country Council, dealt with the development of User-driven Historic Environment Records, and looked at different ways in which users want to access HER data. As a result of the conference, WoSAS is looking at different ways in which we can make our archaeological information more easily accessible!