Today there are far more free and open source softwares available to the global community compared with a couple of decades ago. Thanks to international consortia like the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) there are greater choices about how to conduct geospatial research without incurring heavy costs. As an expert in the field of Geographic Information Systems in heritage, and MAEASaM project’s Co-Investigator for Zimbabwe, Dr Daniel Löwenborg writes about the powerful role of open and free geospatial software in research design, collaboration, and heritage management.
Using advanced and powerful technology for managing and analysing geospatial data does not have to be expensive. In fact, several leading software platforms are entirely built using Open Source solutions and are free to install and use for everyone. This opens many possibilities, ranging from personal use, with QGIS for spatial data editing and analysis, to enterprise level database management with PostgreSQL, that can handle multi-user editing, versioning, and many other great functions. Postgres is used in many industries all over the world, and the extension PostGIS adds functions for geospatial data.
THE USE OF A GEOPACKAGE (GPKG)
For a small organisation, a Postgres or PostGIS can still be a bit of work to install and manage. An easier way to get started with a geospatial infrastructure could be to use the new GeoPackage (GPKG) format, developed by the Open Geospatial Consortium. GPKG is open format and well suited for archiving. It has resolved many of the limitations of the previous and informal standard for vector GIS data – the shapefile, developed by ESRI. Many GIS users are aware of some of the limitations of shapefiles, including the restricted number of characters that can be used in the naming of fields. GPKG takes this away and delivers your data in a single file that can combine multiple layers and tables. This makes it easier to store and share with others. Built on the SQLite architecture, the GPKG acts as a small, portable database which also means that it is possible to have many users accessing and editing data simultaneously, where the GPKG keeps track of the order of edits to avoid any conflicts or replications. All this makes the GPKG a very powerful format and a good way to get started for small organisations to establish a structured way to work with geodata. GPKG is also the default format for vector data in QGIS, so they work very well together.
HERITAGE INFORMATICS
Technical developments in recent years have brought a lot of hope for better and more accessible solutions that are free and open source. There are still several challenges for people involved with cultural heritage informatics, however. A major challenge is how to describe heritage information to make sure it will be understood by others and can be shared and reused. This is why there has been much talk about the FAIR principles since its introduction in 2016. FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) provides a set of guidelines on how to think about data sharing, as well as a set of formal requirements that you can test your data against. A key aspect to ensure that your data is FAIR is to use an established standard for describing the information. An example of a standard that is becoming increasingly used in cultural heritage is CIDOC CRM. CIDOC defines a set of terms to use with clear definitions so that both humans and machines can understand the data. Within the MAEASaM project, we are using the Open Source ARCHES platform which builds on the CIDOC CRM framework to make sure that the information produced will be sustainable both now and in the future, and can be incorporated in even larger infrastructure solutions for the future.
Daniel Löwenborg
MAEASaM Project Co-Investigator for Zimbabwe
Department of Archaeology and Ancient History
Uppsala University