L - P : Archaeology's ARK system

ARK - Archaeological Recording Kit has been developed by Guy Hunt and Stuart Eve from L - P : Archaeology with myself as a recent addition and strong believer in the system.

ARK is basically a content management system developed for heritage data. However, it has the flexibility to be used for any type of dataset.

So far the system has been used for different projects which can be viewed at the ARK gallery page. The following two projects are the ones I have been working on. They are avaliable for viewing and are a good example of the things ARK can do.

Sintana using ARK

The Sintana project is basically a dataset I collected for my bachelor dissertation and more information about it can be viewed here.

The ARK system for the Sintana project is setup with two modules:

Sintana - is the main module which registers information about the find spots for glass from the bachelor dissertation dataset and has spatial point data attached to each find
Bibliography - also a new module which registers each of the bibliographic references which have been used to collect the sintana dataset and links it to the relevant sintana find spots

Feel free to browse the ARK setup of the Sintana data

Sintana ARK

Portus using ARK

The Portus project is an excavation and surveying project of the Portus site outside Rome. For more information on the project please go to the official Portus website.

The ARK system for the Portus project is set up with six modules:

Contexts - most of the ARK systems are based around contexts being the main module
Special finds - a very revamped module which basically covers all things found from bricks to ceramics
Samples - new module for registering samples with functionality for different types of samples
Plans - also an old module which has not had much done to it
Sections - old module which has had some spatial functions added
Files - brand new module which registers any type of files including images and allows for linking to practically anything and a matrix like view for adding new file versions and linking them to older versions or otherwise related files.

If you are on the university network site you can view the original Portus dataset which has been created during the 2007 season. However, if you are on the online site you can only view the example dataset. Feel free to have a browse as even the example set will give a good idea of what ARK can do

Example Portus ARK

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Heritage Portals and cross-border data interoperability

L - P : Archaeology's ARK system

Sintana using ARK

Portus using ARK