QGIS and Virtual Terrain Project

Yesterday I worked a little bit with Alessandro Bezzi to compile  the source code of Virtual Terrian Project inside ArcheOS 4. This operation was pretty simple, thanks to the instruction written by Roberto (BobMax) in his blog, and everything worked good. Than we tried to combine QGIS and VTP with the script Roberto wrote and, also in this case, we were lucky: to run the software it was necessary just a small correction inside the source code of the python script (a wrong path to the binary executable of Enviro). By now on we can work to build the deb package for ArcheOS, but we still have to clarify some points (especially regarding all the libraries connected with VTP). Anyway i think that, with the help of Roberto, we can package an optimized version of the software, to run with QGIS.
Here is a screenshot of QGIS and VTP with some example data (Hawaii Maui Island).

Lund University lessons (slide)

Today I uploaded on Arc-Team's Open Library the slides of a lessons I did with Alessandro Bezzi in Lund University (SE) in March 2011 (the lessons were possible thanks to the effort of Nicolò Dell'unto). The topic regards computational archaeology and it is maybe a "theory lesson", but it can be also useful to have an overview of what it is possible to do with FLOSS in archaeology (and in particular with ArcheOS). Below you see a couple of slides from this lesson.

v.out.labpoints

In www.uselessarchaeology.it you can find theoretical and practical research topics of archaeological methodology. In the last days I added a section of GRASS scripting.

In this section is now downloadable a new GRASS script for exporting a georeferenced raster image of labeled points: v.out.labpoints. It is useful for image rectification through raster model, e.g. using E-Foto in "Aramus" documentation method (see https://wiki.uibk.ac.at/confluence/display/excavationtutor/creazione_fotomosaici). This script enable users to speed the rectification process joining several steps just in one command.

The usage is described in the web page and in the script file. In the next days I'll posted a simple tutorial with an example.

Script (and its name as well) is under construction. It must be developed in order to change variables through shell commands without opening the script file. Moreover need to build a GRASS GUI for this script. In future, the developed script could be add to ArcheOS.

Any contribution or suggestion are welcome.

QGIS python plugins: call for suggestions!

Since a couple of day we are working on QGIS in ArcheOS. As you can read in ArcheOS official blog Fabrizio Furnari is already testing GFOSS repository to add an updated version (1.7) of QGIS (actually ArcheOS 4 alpha support QGIS 1.4). By the way we are also considering to add some plugins by default inside the software; by now we would like to add:

PyArcInit (http://www.pyarchinit.altervista.org/), an archaeological plugin

CADtools (http://www.catais.org/qgis/cadtools/), to improve QGIS potentialities in vector drawing

VTerrain (http://exporttocanoma.blogspot.com/), to provide a solid 3D module to QGIS, thank to Virtual Terrain Project (http://vterrain.org/)

If you now other plugins which will be useful in archaeology, please advise us by writing in one of the official ArcheOS Mailing List:

IT: http://lists.linux.it/listinfo/archeos

EN: http://lists.linux.it/listinfo/archeos-dev

... or simply  by replying to this post

In the image below you can see, for instance, the CADtools plugin

  

stippler-gui

Today I received an email from Giuseppe Amatulli, who is interested in the techniques we used for the automatic archaeological drawing. I hope we can work together to optimize this techniques, maybe integrating most of the steps of the workflow in a single software (GRASS?). Anyway he was also interested, of course, in the source code of the software we used, so I noticed that we never uploaded the software "stippler-gui", the graphical user interface for stippler which Alessandro Bezzi wrote. In the meantime I prepared a fast page in our website, where is also possible to download the source code (released under GPL). As an alternative you can download it in the brand new github public repository.

ArcheOS tutorial updated (transforming coordinates into GIS shapes)

In 2006, after our experience during the Aramus Excavations and Field Shool, we started a project to write documentation about Archeos. The project was possible thanks to the effort of the Institut fuer Alte Geschichte und Altorientalistik of Innsbruck University (Willfrid Allinger-Csollic, Sandra Heinsch and Walter Kuntner) and it is based on a wiki system (dokuwiki). Its aim consists in sharing the know-how in computational archaeology, starting from the lessons we (Arc-Team) do every year during the excavation in Aramus. All the contributes are written in the form of tutorials and released with an open license (generally FDL). Any help from the community is welcome (updates, review, etc...), especially new documents from new authors!
After the release of ArcheOS 4, most of the tutorial  will need updates and today i started with the document "Transforming coordinates into GIS shapes" which explain how to convert raw data from total station into basic geometries for GIS (in this case OpenJUMP). The tutorial is available here. I hope to update soon the next one ("Photomapping (metodo Aramus)").

More info about the archaeological automatic drawing technique

Yesterday I was looking the statistics regarding this blog and I noticed that one of the most popular post is the one about the automatic drawing technique we (Alessandro Bezzi, Simone Cavalieri and me) proposed some years ago. I noticed as well that i forgot to upload in Arc-Team's open library the presentation we did in Foggia (for ArcheoFOSS 5) about this argument (sorry, just in Italian by now...). Now the link is active and you can download the presentation here, or in Academia.edu.
As the slides are in Italian I summarize here the experiment we did in that occasion. We divided archaeological finds in four classes, looking which kind of documentation normally they need.

1) photographic documentation (e.g coins)
2) simple drawing (e.g. flint)
3) drawing + shading (e.g. normal artefacts)
4) drawing + shading + section (e.g. pottery)


Then we developed a five steps techniques to get the appropriate documentation for each class in a automatic or semi-automatic way (using only FLOSS, of course):

1. rectified photo (GRASS - efoto)
2. rectified photo + vector drawing (GRASS - efoto -OpenJUMP)
3. rectified photo + vector drawing + shading (GRASS - efoto -OpenJUMP - stippler -  Inkscape)
4. rectified photo + vector drawing + shading + section (GRASS - efoto -OpenJUMP - stippler - Inkscape - hardware)

Here is an image with the original picture of the archaeological finds we used as test and the final layout.

All the finds come from the excavation in the church of S. Andrea in Storo (TN - Italy) and gave us positive results (I just used to many points in stippler for the drawing of the pottery... anyway it is now easy to change this parameter with the new python interface Alessandro developed).

In the slides you will also find our first test on Lena picture:

The image has nothing to do with sexism, she is just o kind of standard since 70's for raster images tests... by the way she is beautiful :)

2016-04-28 Post updated

In 2010 we wrote an article (in Italian) about this technique:

"Proposta per un metodo informatizzato di disegno archeologico" (here in ResearchGate and here in Academia).