AOC: Archaeological Data Integration for the Study of Long-Term Human and Social Dynamics

该项目将实施一个基于知识的考古数据集成系统(KADIS)，该系统采用新颖的、查询驱动的、特别的数据集成策略。这一努力是对对考古学信息整合需求的长达两年的调查的结果，调查揭示了根本的技术挑战，这些挑战不是通过直接采用现有技术来解决的。一旦考古学家通过KADIS注册了数据集，各科学学科的研究人员就可以在网络上从使用不相称的记录协议收集的大量考古数据集中提取合理整合和适当规模的分析可比观测数据库。虽然KADIS的初步开发将侧重于考古背景下的动物群，但它为全球考古信息基础设施建立了一个开源的、可扩展的基础设施。该项目将建立和访问代表人类使用动物的全部历史的全球原始数据档案的能力。以概念为导向的对该档案的查询将推动社会生态建模工作，并使科学家能够在经验支持下解决大规模和长期的社会科学和自然科学问题，这在迄今是不可想象的。试验台研究将调查导致美国两个地区两千多年来人们喜欢的游戏数量减少的社会环境条件。KADIS的查询驱动的特别集成架构将适用于许多其他科学信息学领域，在这些领域中，需要对多个不同的、不一致的和上下文相关的来源进行复杂的推理。使用KADIS，其他领域的专家可以使用中级考古知识来获得与其调查范围相适应的原始数据。通过为不同领域的学者提供有意义的关于社会、人口和环境的长期数据，考古学可以帮助解释构成当今社会世界并塑造现代环境的复杂的人类和社会动态。对社会科学和自然科学基础设施的影响远远超出了学术界的传统界限。卡迪斯解决了私人、部落和政府考古项目的关键需求。此外，它使学术界以外的个人以及那些缺乏体力或经济能力进行田野工作的人能够进行认真的考古研究。它提供了一种手段，在元数据不足和技术迅速变化的情况下，保持不可替代的原始数据的长期实用性和可访问性。这项研究将雇用一个由研究生助理和本科生实习生组成的多学科团队，并将成为计算机科学专业学生探索科学信息学关键问题的试验台。随着人类学课程中的批判性思维练习被重新设计，使用Kadis的大规模研究数据集，而不是通常分析的人工数据，世界各地的本科生可能会成为一个新的用户群体。

This project will implement a Knowledge-Based Archaeological Data Integration System (KADIS) that employs novel, query-driven, ad hoc data integration strategies. This effort responds to the results of a two-year long investigation into the information-integration demands of archaeology that revealed fundamental technical challenges that could not be handled by a straightforward adaptation of existing technologies. Once archaeologists have registered datasets though KADIS, researchers across scientific disciplines can, over the Web, extract sensibly integrated and appropriately scaled databases of analytically comparable observations from numerous archaeological datasets gathered using incommensurate recording protocols. Although initial development of KADIS will focus on fauna from archaeological contexts, it establishes an open-source, extensible foundation for a global, archaeological information infrastructure. The project will establish the capacity to build and access a worldwide archive of primary data representing the full history of human use of animals. Concept-oriented queries of this archive will advance socio-ecological modeling efforts and allow scientists to address large-scale and long-term social and natural science questions with empirical support that has heretofore been unthinkable. Testbed research will investigate the socio-environmental conditions that lead to depressed abundance of preferred game - over two millennia in two US regions. The query-driven, ad hoc integration architecture of KADIS will be applicable to many other science informatics domains in which complex inferences need to be made over multiple heterogeneous, inconsistent, and context-dependent sources. Using KADIS, specialists in other fields could use intermediate-level archaeological knowledge to obtain primary data scaled to the scope of their inquiries. By providing scholars in diverse fields with meaningful access to long-term data on society, population, and environment, archaeology can help explain the complex human and social dynamics that have constituted today's social world and shaped the modern environment. Impacts on the infrastructure of social and natural science extend far beyond the traditional boundaries of academia. KADIS addresses critical needs of private, tribal, and governmental archaeology programs. In addition, it enables serious archaeological research by individuals outside academia and those lacking physical or financial capacity to do fieldwork. It provides a means to maintain the long-term utility and accessibility of irreplaceable primary data in the face of inadequate metadata and rapidly changing technology. This research will engage a multidisciplinary team of graduate assistants and undergraduate interns and will be a testbed for Computer Science students to explore key issues of science informatics. Undergraduates worldwide can become a new community of users as critical thinking exercises in anthropology courses are redesigned to employ large-scale research datasets using KADIS, rather than the artificial data usually analyzed.