The Alexandria Archive Institute works to build an open, Internet-based, knowledge commons of world cultural heritage. “Dedicated organizations, such as the AAI, are needed to continuously keep pace with developments in scholarship, build and maintain collaborations, and provide needed guidance in data preservation and Web dissemination. We continually build ties with the larger community of âopen-knowledgeâ? initiatives and have launched new collaborations with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Creative Commons, and the Connexions Project”.
ETANA-DL: Managing complex information applications: An archaeology digital library. Funded in part by the National Science Foundation’s ITR program, this “research proposes to develop a digital library (DL) for ancient Near Eastern studies with two archaeological components: DigBase (DB) – a repository and an archive for archaeological data from the Near East and beyond, and DigKit (DK) – a compatible field tool for collecting and recording archaeological data during archaeological surveys and excavations. DB is a model-based, extensible, archaeological componentized DL that will manage complex archaeological information sources based on the client-server paradigm of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). DK is a compatible field tool for collecting, recording and exposing archaeological data in an OAI compliant manner during archaeological surveys and excavations”.
XSTAR: XML System for Textual and Archaeological Research. “The goal of this project is to create a sophisticated Internet-based research environment for specialists in textual and archaeological studies. In particular, XSTAR is intended for archaeologists, philologists, historians, and historical geographers who work with artifacts, documents, and geographical or environmental data. It will not only provide access to detailed, searchable data in each of these areas individually, but will also integrate these diverse lines of evidence as an aid to interdisciplinary research”.
