Limited Scope, Avoidence of Universal Reference Models and Geospatial Technologies

The software focuses on data most pertinent to specialists engaged in the analysis and publication of archaeological material. Accordingly, it is limited to a presentation of the small finds and their provenience (although some other data are present for the purposes of completeness and future development). The focus of the software is to allow specialists access to:

• the archaeological context of their material.
• other small finds found in these contexts.
• media related to these contexts and finds.

Even with this limited scope, numerous problems related to terminology and classification remain.

A few standard dictionaries, vocabularies, and reference frameworks emerged in attempts to tackle similar issues (e.g., CIDOC-CRM, CRMarchaeo, DublinCore). Most of these systems were designed with semantic web usage in mind.

We chose not to utilize them as we consider their enormity and inherited complexities, along with a steep learning curve, barriers to use.

To illustrate, consider the likelihood that ground stone artifact specialists will invariably disagree on terminology used to describe artifacts and will probably resist top-down, pre-assigned existing vocabularies.

Instead, we chose to create a highly configurable software which allows practitioners to easily define and modify their own limited terminologies according to their specific preferences.

This "bottom up" approach may better fit the needs of a specific site and material culture specialists and offer an alternative to more universal systems.

Another scope limitation decision was to avoid geospatial technologies. Some reasonning for this are:

• Geospatial technologies are inherently resource heavy, complex, and ever-changing.
• Relations between (typically partial) geospatial data entities are inherently subjective and questionable.
• While it may be deemed old-fashioned, we suggest that a few pictures and a clear textual description may offer a better documentation of, for example, the relationships between a floor and a wall, which may prove to be more useful than a black-box computer-generated 3D model.

Generally speaking, we chose simplicity and practicality over engagement with totality.