In 2001, a group of archaeologists and anthropologists founded the Alexandria Archive Institute (AAI) to explore ways to make cultural heritage data dissemination easier and more cost effective. In 2003, the AAI received funding from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation as part of their Open Educational Resources initiative and the primary outcome of this funding is Open Context, a highly flexible database that enables communities to publish structured data along with textual narratives and media (images, maps, drawings, videos) on the web.

Open Context grew organically out of efforts by field scientists to pool and relate diverse datasets. These practitioners worked in a variety of disciplines, use different methods, and have different agendas. Open Context’s development has prioritized these features: First, a system should be cost effective. It should require no proprietary software to deploy, build upon or maintain. It should be open sourced to both serve a maximum global audience and to benefit from development in diverse contexts. Cost effectiveness relates also to the system’s reach, where it should be able to be used by small or large groups, with different agendas, research designs, and information sharing needs. A system should also be flexible enough to accommodate diverse media, languages and perspectives, and should be easy to use for the non “tech geek."

Since its public “beta” release in 2006, the Open Context framework is garnering increasing interest from a diverse user community. Large archaeological projects are interested in it as a means to integrate and represent to the public their large corpuses of data and media that may never see print publication. Small projects see the cost-effectiveness (in terms of both time and effort) of using a system that is already developed and yet flexible enough to be tailored to their information sharing needs. Still other groups are expressing interest in developing “portals” that serve the interests of specific communities (related by subject matter or location).

This article, my first for Local Context, Global Commons, reviews the Open Context system and explores ways that it can be localized to serve the global commons.

Open Context is an easy to use, yet powerful, framework that facilitates exploring, searching and analyzing museum collections and field research (including, but not limited to: anthropology, archaeology, and public health). One of the key elements making Open Context different from other science data sharing efforts (typical of e-science or cyberinfrastructure efforts) is its “bottom up” approach. Open Context is built off the same data model used by the University of Chicago’s “Online Cultural Heritage Research Environment” (OCHRE). The data model enables Open Context to support common interfaces and allows users to browse, search, and analyze across different projects and collections. But this data model works at a very general, abstracted level. This means that Open Context enables communities to publish content without forcing them to conform to a predetermined vocabulary or classification system. Thus, Open Context works in a “sweet spot” between the extremes of complete data anarchy, where no integration is possible, and rigid data standardization, where meaning is locked and not contestable.

When putting content into the system, authors determine how items link to other items. They maintain their own terminology and have the option to add explanatory notes to clarify their content. Once the content is made public, communities can further make sense of it by using “folksonomy” tools, such as tagging items either individually or collectively. This tagging can help organize content according to any desired conceptual framework. In the future, we hope others will extend this user contribution system to enable users to tag items in other ways, perhaps including more sophisticated “ontologies” (formal conceptual systems). Thus, Open Context provides an easy to adapt and use tool that enables communities to organize and share cultural heritage collections in ways that are locally meaningful, without sacrificing interoperability.

To help give researchers and heritage organizations more incentive to open their collections to the world, tools for easy citation and attribution are imperative. Citation tools should be obvious so that users who do not think about attribution will take notice. For these reasons, Open Context highlights attribution in a number of ways. Each unit of information can be linked with specific persons and organizations that may have specific roles, such as “author,” “custodian,” “editor,” “owner,” etc. This high degree of granularity facilitates management of intellectual property and enables licensing and privacy rules to be set for each item of information. These capabilities can be important for building recognition and awareness of the achievements and contributions of researchers and cultural organizations in the global South.

The combination of loose, flexible data standards and community-based feedback is necessary for sharing world cultural heritage content. Open Context now best serves as a model for a workable approach toward cultural heritage data sharing. But to realize the larger vision of sharing our understanding of the past, broad community involvement is required. We’re actively publishing content in the system to demonstrate the value of its model. Currently we’re actively engaged with publishing Brown University's excavations at Petra, a UNESCO World Heritage site and crown jewel of Jordan’s rich past. Integrating the many digital components of this complex, multidisciplinary project into Open Context will represent a significant achievement for our system.

Another important step in building this community is to release Open Context open source, and invite a larger and more capable development team to enhance and extend its model into new directions. This community can optimize source code, extend the data model to meet new needs, and incorporate web services to link Open Context with other rapidly growing web resources. Finally, if Open Context is to be truly open, it must better support localization and different forms of presentation for different communities and heritage organizations.

The Alexandria Archive Institute and iCommons are working together to open up access to cultural heritage by further developing Open Context into a free platform that is localizable and has interfaces in multiple languages. The system will be easy to customize offering stylesheets for multilingual interfaces, options to customize interfaces and “brand” them with project logos and styles, and easy installation. We aim to have at least one archive collection implement the system and we will track the impact of greater accessibility. Impact will be measured by exploring the size and diversity of the audience the archive reaches; how the audiences explore the archive and whether they add value to its collections through tagging, weblog comments and discussion forums; and whether the archive (and its subject matter) is receiving recognition from local or international media or peer organizations. A flexible, open sourced system with customization tools for localization across institutions of various sizes and with diverse interests and needs, and which provides clear attribution of creators/authors, will go a long way to promote the commons.

tags: San Francisco, CA United States science-research data sharing integration archaeology museums field science local-context-global-commons culture

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