Limited Scope and Rejection of Universal Reference Models and Geospatial Technologies

This 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 primary function 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.

Terminology and classification of archaeological records and small finds is problematic. A few standard dictionaries, vocabularies, and reference frameworks have been developed to try and tackle them (e.g., CIDOC-CRM, CRMarchaeo, DublinCore). Most of these systems were designed with the Semantic Web in mind and are universal in nature.

We chose not to utilize them because we consider their enormity and complexity, along with their steep learning curves, barriers to use.

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

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

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

Another scope limitation decision was to avoid geospatial technologies. Some reasons 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.
• The visual appeal and seeming authority of a computer-generated model may hide the ambiguity and complexity of relations that may be better captured by images and a clear textual description.

Generally speaking, we chose simplicity and practicality over totality.