3D PDF for archaeology

Today I am preparing the presentation for the meeting in Ferrara (see the previous post), so I did some experiments with 3D PDF. I think this kind of documentation has good potentialities in archaeology. To test them I took some old data (the 3D skull done with Sfm and IBM techniques), I build the surface in Meshlab and with the same software I saved an u3d file. Then, with the help of Kyle, I wrote a (very) simple 3d document. The result is the image below. As you can see, to visualize my 3d PDF I had to virtualize Windows inside my VritualBox and run Adobe Reader. Up to now I did not find a pdf reader for Linux which is able to visualize u3d, so if you know one, please let me know...

Anyway, if you want to visualize the result, you can download the file here.

Which GIS? gvSIG

To tell the truth, i don't use very often gvSIG. Anyway it is for sure one of the software which has evolved faster since its first inclusion in ArcheOS. Moreover the program is pretty similar to ESRI GIS, so it is perfect to help new users of FLOSS (people for whom a direct migration form ArcGIS to GRASS could be traumatic). An other important aspect is that gvSIG is maybe the GIS in ArcheOS which has the easiest (and most functional) tool to get direct layouts, so if you settle for basic maps (without to many complications) this is probably your software. In the image below you can see an example of layout model, done with an old version of gvSIG.

Metodo Aramus

In 2006 we joined the Aramus Excavations and Field School. That one was our first year in the project as a society. Our primary goal was to help in software migration from closed source softwares to FLOSS. The migration ended without problems, thanks to ArcheOS, but it caused some minor changes in the archaeological workflow. One of most important was the new methodology we had to develop in order to performe a fast photomapping technique of the excavation (at least as fast as the system they used before). We called this new methodology "metodo Aramus" and, untill now, we are still using it. The main reason is the quality we reached with the georeferenced photomosaics: compared with other traditional techniques, every single photo in the final image is equlized in brighteness and contrast. The result is a composite picture in which is more or less impossible to recognize the borders between the single photos.  

Comparison between traditional methodology and Metodo Aramus