Enabling the Study of LongTerm Human and Social Dynamics: A Cyberinfrastructure for Archaeology NSF

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Enabling the Study of Long-Term Human and Social
Dynamics A Cyberinfrastructure for Archaeology
(NSF Grant SES 0433959)
Presented at the National Science Foundation in
September 2005 in a meeting of PIs of NSFs 2004
Human and Social Dynamics grants.

• Principal Investigators Keith W. Kintigh
  (kintigh_at_asu.edu),
• John M. Anderies, Chitta R. Baral, K. Selçuk
  Candan, Hasan Davulcu, Michelle Hegmon, Subbarao
  Kambhampati, Ann Kinzig, Huan Liu, Peter H.
  McCartney, Ben Nelson, Margaret C. Nelson,
• Charles L. Redman, Arleyn W. Simon, Katherine A.
  Spielmann, and Sander van der Leeuw

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The Promise and Challenge of Archaeological Data
Integration

• Archaeologys long-term and spatially extensive
  data on society, economy, human biology,
  population, and environment has the potential to
  contribute uniquely to scientific understandings
  of socio-ecological dynamics. The fundamental
  challenge is to enable scientifically meaningful
  use of the expanding corpus of archaeological
  data.

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Grant Objectives

• Build a shared disciplinary vision for
  cyberinfrastructure, assess the challenges that
  must be addressed, and develop an implementation
  strategy.
• Develop a base ontology, schema, and
  demonstration application for faunal data in
  archaeology.

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Teamwork
Project archaeologists and computer scientists on
the project worked to understand each others
disciplinary language
Team retreat and visit to Honanki Ruin, Arizona
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Workshop

• The grant sponsored a December 2004 workshop
  including 31 individuals representing diverse
  archaeological interests computer scientists
  concerned with information integration and
  informatics and domain scientists associated
  with informatics infrastructure projects in other
  disciplines.

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Vision

• A sustainable, concept-oriented, query- and
  context-driven, archaeological information
  integration infrastructure that
• provides integrated and scaled cross-project
  access to dynamic archives of archaeological,
  physical anthropological, and environmental data
• enables scholars across scientific disciplines to
  address large-scale and long-term research
  questions

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Workshop Report

• The workshops full report will be published in
  the Society for American Archaeologys American
  Antiquity (Jan or Apr 2006)
• A summary appeared in the American
  Anthropological Associations Anthropology News
  (September 2005)

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Disciplinary Endorsement

• The workshop report received strong endorsement
  from the major professional societies
• Society for American Archaeology
• American Association of Physical Anthropologists
• Society for Historical Archaeology

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Cyberinfrastructure Demands

• Informed use of archaeological data requires
  integrating data collected at different scales at
  different times by different investigators using
  variable data recovery strategies and
  inconsistent classification schemes.
• Data integration must be sensitive to complex
  archaeological contexts and recovery techniques.
• Key variables are often several inferential steps
  removed from direct observations and inferential
  procedures differ among investigators.
• It is not possible or advisable to reduce data to
  a single standard. As a consequence,
  straightforward adaptation of existing
  information integration technologies is
  unworkable.

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Computer Science Challenges

• An ultimate integrated view of multiple data
  sets is usually impossible and unnecessary. Thus,
  it is most effective to reconcile data source
  observations with the data requirements of a
  query (rather than attempting global
  reconciliation of data sources). Needed is a
  novel strategy of query-driven, ad-hoc data
  integration in which, given a query, the
  cybertools will identify relevant data sources,
  perform interactive, on-the-fly metadata matching
  to align key portions of the data, and reason
  with potentially incomplete and inconsistent
  information using multiple ontologies.

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Application

• A powerful cyberinfrastructure for archaeology
  will massively improve theorists ability to
  model long-term stability and change in coupled
  social and environmental systems. It will
  further make critical archaeological and
  environmental data meaningful to users in other
  fields, e.g.,
• Geographers/environmental sociologists
  identifying persistent human impacts
• Geomorphologists dating erosional events
• Demographers examining long-term migration trends
• Botanists/zoologists looking at species spread or
  decline over long period

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Generalizability

• Development of ad-hoc, query-driven data
  integration tools will be useful in historical
  and other sciences that have
• Heterogeneous data sources
• Highly contextual data
• Competing taxonomies and definitions
• Inconsistent data collection with frequent
  missing values
• Data in which many inferential steps separate
  observations from the variables of interest

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Connections