Introduction

Open Context is a flexible system to publish their primary field data, notes and media (images, maps, drawings, videos) on the Web. Open Context provides an easy to use, yet powerful, common framework for exploring, searching and analyzing excavation results, survey data and museum collections. Because of sophisticated approaches toward data integration, Open Context makes museum collections and field research easier to find, explore, understand and reuse. This interoperability of data from diverse sources gives Open Context important advantages over many other data sharing approaches. Finally, Open Context draws on powerful open source technologies (MySQL, PHP, and Dojo Ajax). These technologies are widely accessible and supported by a huge developer community. Thus, Open Context can be easily deployed and maintained by anyone with standard web development skills.

What types of material can I publish with Open Context?

Open Context is best suited for publishing large bodies of complex archaeological documentation. All content is linked together in an integrated, though very flexible and generalized data publication system. This flexibility stems from over 15 years of development and field-testing of database schemas by David Schloen, lead of the University of Chicago OCHRE system. As such, Open Context uses a subset of the ArchaeoML global schema, the heart of the University of Chicago OCHRE system. Because of this, Open Context can support sophisticated boolean query capabilitied on structured data provided by contributors without requiring any predetermined recording standards. Below lists some of the types of content organized by this system:

· Narratives: Narratives are textual types of content, including excavation notes, observations and diaries. These narratives are integrated and linked to other types of information, including database records and other media (images, videos, maps, etc.).

· Analytic (Tabular) Data: Open Context enables publication of “database” types of content. These include context databases, finds registries, museum registries and catalogues, and specialist analyses. All of these different types of data are automatically imported and integrated (through special software) in one cohesive database.

· Media: Open Context links digital images, maps, drawings, GIS files, videos, and other types of media with other forms of content. For example, a user will immediately know if an item in a finds registry was photographed or drawn because a “thumbnail” image will appear with the record of that item.

What main features does Open Context provide?

While development and upgrades continue, a functioning beta database is currently in use on the Web (www.opencontext.org). A current list of features includes the following:

· Web-based Data Publication: “Open Context: Penelope”, a web-based data publishing tool (Dojo AJAX, PHP), is currently being tested by a small user group. It will be released as part of this project to enable individual researchers and museum collections managers to publish their own datasets and make them interoperable with Open Context. The tool includes data upload, schema mapping, data editing, and metadata creation functions.
· Advanced Search: In addition to the simple “Google-like” search, Open Context supports sophisticated search composition using Boolean logic. The Advanced Search option enables users to compose Boolean queries on one or more project datasets at once. Query phrases and search results can be saved and shared with the folksonomy taggint tools. The ability to make analytically precise queries across several different datasets makes Open Context an important new tool for using primary research.
· Smarter Querying: User selection sets (search results) can be further filtered with the Advanced search option. The advanced search tool displays only those variables and properties relevant to their current selection set.
· Citation and Easy Retrieval: Stable URL links are attached to each and every piece of content, so items can be referenced in paper or e-publications and retrieved on the Web. Automatic generation of citations for each item to encourage scholarly use.
· Community approach to “Data Integration”: Open Context offers a “folksonomy” tool to enable semantic data integration. Users can tag items either individually or collectively (i.e. users can assign a tag to items in a query result set). When query result sets are tagged, the history of query composition is automatically linked to the tagging event. Users can also further annotate and explain the rationale behind their tag assignments. Tags can be used to save search selections for future reference and to share sets of items with colleagues. The folksonomy tool is one of the more exciting areas of Open Context development. Open Context is developing several enhancements to this system, including better ways of recognizing professional credentials and scholarly authority, and options for users to apply professionally developed standard vocabularies such as the Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus or future “ontologies” (formalized conceptual systems for disciplinary communities).
· Adding value with Analyses: Open Context provides feedback tools, such as a “ping-back”, which keeps track of external links to the data in the system. If someone uses a weblog to discuss an interpretation of a collection, they can link to an item or set of items in Open Context. Open Context would recognize that link and send an email to a museum administrator to make sure that the weblog post makes appropriate use of the data. If the administrator agrees, Open Context will automatically make a link back to it to the referring weblog. This is a way of adding value to collections data, since the database can carry links to relevant interpretations, commentary, and analyses.
· Data Export: Data analysis tools, including easy export to MS-Excel and some statistical summary tools.
· Sharing Updates: Open Context provides a number of RSS feeds (specifically, RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0). RSS (“Really Simple Syndication”) is a widely adopted Internet standard for sharing updates of content between different web services. Open Context RSS feeds enable collections administrators to share news and updates across the Internet.
· Impact Measures: Assessing the value of primary data publication is still in its infancy. Nevertheless, recent studies have shown a significant correlation between download counts and more traditional citation impact measures. In order to a preliminary measure of the usage and significance of each dataset, Open Context records information on visits and publicly displays running summaries of these usage data.

· Faceted search: Open Context uses Apache SOLR to offer faceted search capabilities across multiple collections. The faceted navigation features returns useful summary information that provides an overview of the characteristics of a set of items according to multiple dimensions of metadata.

· Atom / RESTful services: Open Context offers a variety of RESTful web-services to help maximize data portability and simplify collaboration with related web systems and other tools such as weblogs, feed-aggregation services and more.