WHY THE PROJECT CHOSE ARCHES
As the primary users, Africa’s heritage stakeholders have an essential role in how the MAEASaM database develops, making it important to choose a freely available, flexible platform and to tailor-make the solutions. Mahmoud Abdelrazak, the project’s database developer, provides some thoughts on the opportunities and challenges afforded by the technology.
Recording data about archaeological sites is a complex task. As well as the need to reduce natural and continuous attributes to quantifiable and standardised measures, the very nature of sites introduces ambiguities and uncertainties. A site’s spatial boundaries are often difficult to define and represent on digital systems. To confound things further, archaeological sites carry ambiguous attributes such as chronology and type of classification. Conceptualising and representing sites in a digital database therefore requires careful consideration.
The choice of a database technology is informed by the technical requirements for the project, and the nature of data and the people who will make use of the system. Findability,Accessibility, Interoperability and Reuse (FAIR) data management principles impose certain requirements, while the need to standardise the data model and ensure its sustainability requires standard ontologies in archiving, such as CIDOC-CRM. Additionally, if a database is to be used across different countries, as is the case with the MAEASaM project, Thesauri are needed to define terms that may be applied differently, and in more than one language. A cascading Thesaurus can help in creating a common understanding of the heritage data.
Above: Arches frontend user interface.
Choosing 
Arches fits our purpose. Developed by the Getty Institute as a free software, licensed under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License, Arches provides an easy to use and clean interface to the user whilst maintaining complex data and functions on the backend.
Arches uses PostgreSQL to build a graph database instance and Elasticsearch as a search engine on top of the database for rapid query response. It supports the use of ontologies and Thesauri for data modelling and data quality control respectively.
The main interface of Arches is a map with a side bar containing search results. The interface allows researchers access to the data stored in an organised manner. The security module built in Arches allows the system administrator to limit access to the data for each user or group of users, which can be employed to regulate access to certain sites of sensitive location and possible threats.
- Mahmoud Abdelrazek, MAEASaM Database Developer
Computer code image by David Pupaza from Unsplash