Limited Scope: Avoidance 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 have been built 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 because their inherent complexities, along with a steep learning curve, are barriers to use. In addition, their pre-defined vocabularies may not be acceptable to all practitioners.

For example, most ground stone artifact specialists disagree on even the most basic terminology to describe artifacts and will probably resist top-down, pre-assigned ones.

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

This "bottom up" approach may better fit the varying needs of specific sites, material cultures, and specialists. It offers an alternative to these "universal" systems.

Another scope limitation decision was to avoid geospatial technologies. Some of the reasons for this include:

• Geospatial technologies are inherently resource heavy, complex, and ever-changing
• Relations between (typically partial) geospatial data entities are inherently subjective and questionable

We suggest that a clear textual description accompanied by images may offer better documentation of the relationships between a floor and a wall, for example, and may prove to be more useful than a black-box computer-generated 3D model.

Generally speaking, we chose simplicity and practicality.