The project is providing an open access geospatial relational database on endangered archaeological sites and cultural heritage in Botswana, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mali, Senegal, the Sudan, Tanzania and Zimbabwe. The database is built as an instance of 
About Arches
Arches is an open-source software platform for cultural heritage data management developed jointly by the Getty Conservation Institute and World Monuments Fund and currently maintained by Farallon Geographics.
Why Arches – some key benefits
- A map-centred interface to display and manage the data.
- A local search engine to index the database quickly and efficiently.
- Built-in security features that enable multiple levels of access to the data.
- Unlike traditional structured databases, Arches uses graph database mechanisms in the form of resource models.
- The complexity of the archeological data is preserved in a cascading structure of nodes and relationships.
- Information is encoded in a semantically aware design.
- Arches supports the use of ICOM’s CIDOC CRM for creating resource models. Connected to them are ontological concepts extracted from data to express controlled terms.
Key elements of the approach
The project is planning to collect data using a suite of cross-platform tools and free and open source software whenever available. In collaboration with our partners, the data collection pipelines are being created using widely used and reliable tools such as QGIS and ODK.
The work will include:
- Online publication of an almanac of common and country-based site type descriptions and characteristics for the overall project
- Modification of the codebase to enable utilisation in low resource and narrow bandwidth environments
- Training of in-country personnel on the use and updating of the database.
Next steps
The MAEASaM Arches database is currently under development. We aim to provide a public interface with a selected dataset soon.