Archaeology, Alexa and NLP

Hello everyone,

this post regards some test we are doing in these weeks about the application of NLP (Natural Language Processing) to archaeology. This research is conducted by our friend Andres Reyes (Arc-Team), an expert in this field.

Among the many possibilities of NLP in CH (Cultural Heritage), we decided to start with something particular and probably not so easy, but very useful for everyday work: a project manager for archaeology. The video below shows a preview of the system (how the system finds an old project).

 

To understand what I mean, I have to explain very fast why this tool would be a great help in our field. In Professional Archaeology (or, if you prefer Commercial Archaeology) projects can be divided in 4 main categories: excavations (probably the 70% of the work), surveys (and explorations in general), Cultural Heritage Enhancement (Valorization) and studies (mainly researches on specific archaeological and historical topics). From a logistical point of view, the most critical projects are the ones related with excavation and surveys, especially if performed in extreme conditions (Glacial Archaeology, High Mountain Archaeology, Underwater Archaeology, Speleoarchaeology, etc...), since in most cases the office (and all its comforts) is far away. Even if assisted by the strong computerization of the last 15 - 20 years, field operations can end up with errors, especially if many people work simultaneously to the same project from different area (for instance, a common mistake is giving the same code to different layers or artefacts).

A way to try to avoid errors is to use DBMSs (DataBase Management Systems) and GIS directly on the field, but this solution has some weakness, mainly related with the devices on which these software runs and with the necessity to find a comfortable location to insert the data (even if temporary). Thanks to the wider and wider coverage of internet and the new generation's smart-phones it is now simpler and faster to insert data into a main server trough a DBMS with a well designed interface (for GIS it is still better to work with a rugged laptop). Nevertheless these operations are still time consuming and keeps the archaeologist busy for a while, with all the difficulties coming from the use of a small touch-screen (gloves, dirty hands, rain, etc...). For this reason a Project Manager based on vocal commands could improve the work on the field, avoiding the main errors deriving by some of the most common stress factors (short time-table, weather conditions, several people working simultaneously, etc...).

Despite our decision to work with FLOSS, for this first experiment with NLP we decided to start with Amazon Alexa virtual assistant, for several reasons: the great effort of Amazon in developing the system, its strong diffusion among users and the good support in Italian (the language of our firts prototype). Nevertheless, as soon as we will have a first prototype, we plan to test and develop also open source solution, like Microft. BTW all our code will be released ASAP, with open source licenses, in this public repository on GitLab.

Currently our prototype is in a very early stage, but we already modified it a couple of time, with sensible changes in our strategy. For instance, in order to keep everything simple, at the beginning we based on shared google doc spreadsheets. This solution was more than enough to manage the list of codes related with US (Unità Stratigrafice, EN Stratigraphical Units), artefacts, samplings, documentations (in 3D and 2D), with also the possibility to keep controlled the budget and the working hours. soon we changed this strategy to have a more performing DBMS, based on the FLOSS PostgreSQL. Currently we are developing more options, like the possibility to ask to the Project Manager in which project we worked during a specific month.

I hope this post will be useful. If you want to collaborate to the project, please contact us. Have a nice day!

CHNT 22, 2017. Proceedings online

Hi everyone.

Since 2017 we are with Marco Block Berlitz and Moritz Mennenga  to organize a session about underwater archaeology during the annual conference Cultural Heritage and Newt Technologie (CHNT), held in Vienna.

This short post is to report that, thanks to the effort of Susanne Uhlirz and Wolfgang Börner, the proceedings of the 22nd conference are now online. This is the direct link to proceedings, while, if you are interested in our contribution ("Documentation and sampling strategies in underwater archaeology. General criteria and specific solutions"), you can read here.

The first slide of Arc-Team's presentation at CHNT 2017

 Have a nice day!

Imago Animi editathon

Hi all,

sorry for the long silence, but working in archaeology and cultural heritage is not a simple task and this year we had very few time for our open projects and, consequentially for ATOR.

This new post is to report that in 2018 we went on with the open source research about "Facce. I motli volti della storia umana" ("Faces. The many aspects of human history"). The new step consisted in the opening of a new derived exhibition, called "Imago Animi. Volti dal passato" ("Imago Animi. Faces from the Past"), hosted in the Councilor's Palace (Palazzo Assessorile) of Cles (Trentino - Italy).

One of the goals of this new event is to go on with the scientific dissemination of the open source material produced until now and regarding the topic of the human face, under an anthropological, archaeological and artistic point of view. To speed up this work, we are trying to organize a wiki editathon which will be focus on the exhibition "Iamgo Animi", in order to enrich many of the pages of wikipedia which are connected to these arguments and to upload old and new facial reconstructions, done during the preparation of the event.

As an example, I post here the reconstructive portrait of Bernardo Clesio, the Italian cardinal, born in Cles, who was the main contributor of the famous Council of Trent. His facial reconstruction is one of the new work done by @Cicero Moraes (Arc-Team expert in 3D forensic facial reconstruction) for the new exhibition. These images are also particular because they are not done through the forensic facial protocol we developed during the last years here in ATOR, but rather with a new iconographic technique, based on the art-historical study on the known portraits of Bernardo Clesio (performed by Marcello Nebl), validated by a comparison to select the the common facial features (performed by @Luca Bezzi), in order to achieve a philologically reconstructed 3d portrait (modeled by @Cicero Moraes). This workflow has been necessary because it has not been possible to organize a forensic study on the remains of the cardinal (deu to the strict time table of the preparation of "Imago Animi").

Here below are the two iconographic reconstructive portraits performed with the technique described above.

The iconographic reconstructive 3d portrait of Bernardo Clesio

The iconographic reconstructive 3d portrait of Bernardo Clesio (profile)

Like always, the material uploaded in ATOR is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
I hope this post was useful and that the editathon will give a small contribution to the Wikipedia project.

Have a nice day!

Archaeologist: A 360° Profession

Following this blog, it may seem that modern archaeology consists mostly of hacking, compiling software and staring blankly at the computer-screen.

But fortunately it's not always like that!

Maintenance of cultural goods, for example, is a big challenge.
Arc-Team is proud to contribute to that on numerous occasions.
Like in this video: Two of us are members of the board of trustees "Schloss Welsperg". The castle was build in the 12th century and is cared by that association since 1989.

Watch us doing forestry work along the curtain wall of the Castle Welsperg:

You want to see more?  
Subscribe our You-Tube Channel!
 

ArcheoFOSS 2016 in Cagliari!

Hi all,

this post is to notify that next ArcheoFOSS workshop (the eleventh edition) will be held in Cagliari, at the local university, by the Department of History, Cultural Heritage and Landscape (it: Dipartimento di storia, beni culturali e territorio). The meeting will take place from the 7th to the 9th October 2016 and the main topic will be: "Knowledges for communication. Tools and open technologies for the analysis and the sharing of our cultural and territorial heritage".

Pictures of Cagliari (by various users from flickr; CC-SA)

This year there will be some novelties and, among others, the fact that the workshop will be associated with the GFOSS Day, the annual meeting of the Italian Association of the Geographic Free Software (GFOSS). 

The conference will be organized with three main sessions: the first day (7th October) will be dedicated to different workshop about Free and Open Source software used for geographical or cultural (and archaeological) aims; during the second day (8th October) some key-note speakers will present general topics (e.g. legislation about the use of open data and public data), while parallel sessions will host more specific arguments; the last day (9th October) will be focused on operative activities, like mapping parties and similar happenings (thanks to the association Sardegna Open Data).
If you are interested in proposing a contribution, here are the thematic guidelines:

• FLOSS (Free/Libre and Open Source Software) applied to research (main topic: archeology, cultural heritage and landscape)
• FLOSS for protection, management and development of archaeological, cultural or territorial heritage
• FLOSS for visualization, analysis and web-publication of data realted with archeology, cultural heritage and landscape
• Projects oriented in opening and sharing data (related with archeology, cultural heritage or landscape studies
• Case studies of using FLOSS in order to develop and share territorial data
• Experiences in opening and sharing geographic data (cultural, technological and legal aspsects
• Experiences of institution (schools, universities, public administrations, etc...) in using free geographic software or migrating form closed software to FLOSS or hybrid systems

If you plan to join one of the two workshops, you need to send your proposal, using this module, to this address: archeofoss.gfoss2016@gmail.com
Here you can download the call for papers.

For more informations, please visit the site of GFOSS Day and ArcheoFOSS.

See you there!

New course at Evora University: Open Source Digital Technologies applied to Cultural Heritage

Between 2011 and 2015 we gave lessons at Lund University (Sweden), during the course regarding "Digital Archeology" (held by Nicolò Dell'Unto). Our primary task was to introduce the students to the Free and Open Source Software (FLOSS) to be used during their professional life (while the proprietary and closed software were presented by other teachers). These lessons were following the practical approach we developed since 2006, during our experience in training students for Innsbruck University (Austria) in the archaeological field-schools of Aramus (Armenia) and Khovle Gora (Georgia), directed by Walter Kuntner and Sandra Heinsch. These courses, taught during missions abroad, were possible thanks to the use of ArcheOS, the Free Archaeological Operating System we are developing since 2005. In 2009 our didactic experience was enriched by some lessons we gave during our participation at the TOPI Excellence Cluster of Berlin (Germany), where we further refine our techniques in 3D documenting Cultural Heritage with FLOSS, using Structure from Motion and Multi-View Stereo Reconstruction and starting a collaboration with +Pierre Moulon for the development of a GUI (Graphical User Interface) of its photogrammetric software Python Photogrammetry Toolbox (PPT: related post in ATOR: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). PPT was also one of the topic of the UNESCO master "Open Techne", in which could teach between 2013 and 2014, for the University of Siena and the Centro di Geotecnologie.
Despite some of these experiences are now over, we have a new opportunity to work with students during the courses regarding  Open Source Digital Technologies applied to Cultural Heritage, which will be held in July at the University of Evora in Portugal and it is organized by +Carlo Bottaini and Rui Bordalo.
The fist lessons will be focused on 2D documentation Methodologies with Management through GIS, while a second module will regard the Methodologies of 3D Documentation. For further informations, here is the main page regarding the courses (in English and in Portuguese).
If you are in the nearby of Evora and you want to work professionally in the field of Cultural Heritage with Free and Open Source applications, this would be a good starting point.
I hope to see you there! Have a nice day!

Monuments of Evora (by Lumastan)

PS
We will not teach in Lund this year, but some lessons about Open Source in archeology will be given by our friend +giacomo landeschi, who knows the topic very well as well as most of our methodology (having worked with us for several years).

2016-04-08 Update

For people interested in the course, here is possible to download a pdf leaflet with all the necessary informations.
 

WebRTIViewer

Hi all,

I write this post to complete the one +Rupert Gietl did regarding Large Scale Reflectance Transformation Imaging. As you read in that article, Rupert, using +GRASS GIS, re-built virtually the necessary light conditions to process an RTI image of an entire archaeological area. 

This is just one of the test we are carrying on with RTI techniques, since we are trying to evaluate this methodology under different aspects. Obviously, during our experiments, we encounter interesting researches carried on by other institutions. 

This post regards one of the projects we found on our way (I will write soon about other related works) and, more precisely, a software to share RTI images through internet: WebRTIViewer. Actually the source code of the application, an HTML5-WebGL viewer, is release under the therms of the General Public License 3 (GPL 3) on the website of its author: +Gianpaolo Palma.

Here is an example of its application, using Rupert's data of the archaeological site (better visualized here). To see it, just turno on the light and, holding the left button, move your mouse around.

The software comes with two binary tools (one for Windows 32 bit and the other for Windows 64 bit), which are necessary to prepare the RTI images for the viewer. For this reason I wrote to Giampolo Palma to ask if there would be the possibility to insert WebRTIViewer and the other applications in ArcheOS (to do this we would need the access to the source code of the binary tools, called webGLRTIMaker) and he kindly answered that he likes the idea and he would agree, but before to release the code of the webGLRTIMaker under an open license he will ask the opinion of his labs colleagues (the Visual Computing Lab). This institute, part of the Italian CNR-ISTI, is the same that develops other nice Free/Libre and Open Source (FLOSS) software, usefull in archaeology, such as MeshLab, which is often in our post, or 3DHOP (soon a post about it). Hopefully, if everything goes well, we will have another nice tool to add to the ArcheOS software selection, helping Cultural Heritage professionals in sharing data through RTI technologies.

Here below you can see again webRTIViewer in action (better visualized here), this time with data coming from the archaeological excavation of Khovle Gora (in Georgia), where we work for the University of Innsbruck (Austria) and support technically the fieldwork directed by Dr. Walter Kuntner of the Institut für Alte Geschichte und Altorientalistik.

Augmented Reality at Cultways

Yesterday Arc-Team attended the workshop "Cultural tourism and mobile technologies" organized by Trentino Sviluppo in the city of Rovereto. The meeting was related with the European project Cultways and, although we had not participated in the work (already concluded), we were invited to show some related research we did for other institutions (especially the Soprintendenza per i Beni Librari, Archivistici e Archeologici di Trento).

Here below is the poster we presented, done (like always) with Inkscape and GIMP:

The poster for the workshop

In addition to the poster, we prepared some Augmented Reality applications, to show the potentialities of this techniques in Cultural Heritage.
The first installation we did is a prototype for the upcoming exhibition that should take place in Padua in November 2014, as a collaboration between the Antrhropological Museum of the city, Antrocom Onlus, and Arc-Team. This event, called "Facce. I volti della storia umana", is the natural evolution of the Taung Project, and is ideally connected with the exhibition "Faces da Evolução" which took place in Curitiba (BZ). Both of the exhibitions are intended to be "open source", as the data, the software and the know-how has been (and will be) shared through the net.
Here is a short clip of the application, which is based on the joint used of Augmented Reality and 3D printed objects with RepRap (with the help of our friends of Kenstrapper):

The second installation we prepared is a prototype we developed for the Museum of Torre di Pordenone, in order to allow tourist fruition of part of the roman villa buried under the garden.

The third application regards a pilot project we are working on for the Archaeological Office of the Provincia Autonoma di Bolzano Alto Adige/ Autonome Provinz Bozen Suedtirol. The research is connected with a survey to map and document the WW1 evidences in the territory. As an experimental stage of the same project we are testing some Augmented Reality tools to develop cultural sightseeing of the landscape, looking to the commemoration of this event which will be in 2014/2015. Currently we are considering the possibility to print interactive maps like the prototype below:

Just an example of interactive map

Please notice that the informations displayed in the map are not geographically correct: they are just an example to show all the possible kind of data which can be loaded (images, movies, 3D models).

Another possibility for tourist fruition are interactive panels, like the one below...

A test for a panel

... in this case we just added a simple image, but, like the map before, we could load movies or 3D objects.

All the Augmented reality applications were done with Open Source and Free Software. I will describe these tools in the next post, but you can already find some information here in ATOR (just search for this topic).

ArcheoFOSS 2013, deadline extension

If I give a coin to you and you give me a coin, each of us will have a coin, but if I give an idea to you and you give me an idea, than each of us will have two ideas.

(Chinese proverb)

Hi all,

the deadline for ArcheoFOSS workshop 2013 (open source, free software and open format in archaeological research processes) has been extended (if you do not know this meeting, see this previous post).

It is possible to submit paper proposal until April 15th, while suggestions for special sessions will be accepted till the 5th of the same month.

The main topics for the workshop 2013 will be:

• Methods and experiences of collaboration between different organizations and institutions in the field of cultural heritage, involving the use and the development of open source, free software and open format.
• Methods and experience using open source, open data, free software and open format in archeology and ICT.
• Methods, experiences and development of technological tools during open collaborations between multidisciplinary research areas (humanities and science) in the field cultural heritage.
• Contributions on the state of the art and proposals for regulations and laws, relating to the management and sharing of cultural heritage in order to support free communication, accessibility and enjoyment.
• Teaching and sharing archaeological methodologies using FLOSS.

The workshop will take place in Catania (Sicily) on 18 and 19 June. As it happened with the previous event, it will be an excellent opportunity to discuss and exchange ideas, knowledge and technology in the field of open archeology.

The first photomosaic for architectural purposes?

In these days I am teaching various techniques to document in 2D cultural heritage with FLOSS (Free/Libre and Open Source Software) at the UNESCO master Open Techne. In particular I speak about photomapping and 2D photogrammetry technologies (to record horizontal and vertical surfaces).

Teaching students is always an interesting and instructive experience and , in most cases, it is often a mutual exchange of information, so it is more similar to a dialogue than to a monologue. I often learned a lot during these occasions and sometimes I have the opportunity to further investigate particular topics or to change my point of view on them, thanks to the discussion with other people.

Today it happened something like this: we were investigating the right way to correctly take pictures in order to use them for am architectural photomosaic (fortunately among the students there are not only archaeologists, but also architects, engineers, computer technicians, etc...), so I thought that a good example was the "photographic paint" maid in 1873 by Giacomo Rossetti, that I happened to see some years ago visiting the Musei Civici di Arte e Storia di Brescia (IT). You can see this "masterpiece" in the image below:

Photographic paint of S. Maria dei Miracoli in Brescia (G. Rossetti)

If I remember well what I read about this photographic paint, G. Rossetti built a wooden stage in order to collect the different photos that compose the photomosaic without excessive distortion. Of course now there are simpler ways to take good pictures (just read the last post Alessandro wrote about the UAV dornes we built), but the question of the students was: 

is this the first example of photomosaic for architecturale purposes?

To be honest, I was not able to answer the question. I just know that G. Rossetti presented its work during the exposition in Vienna in 1873 (where he won the medal of merit), but he started similar project earlier (around 1862). It seems that Rossetti's experiments were most appreciated abroad that at home (there is not even an Italian page in Wikipedia), so I think that better informations can be found in foreign countries.

 If some of the readers knows similar work of other photograpgers/artist (or of G. Rossetti), please report them on this blog, so next time maybe I will be able to better answer to student's question about this topic :).

Master UNESCO Open Téchne: Open Source technologies for Cultural Heritage

In 2013 will start the first UNESCO master "Open Techne" (Open Source technologies for Cultural Heritage). The master is organized by the Istituto di Formazione e Ricerca della Federazione Italiana Club e Centri UNESCO e il Centro di GeoTecnologie (CGT) dell’Università degli Studi di Siena, with the aim to train professionals capable of using innovative open source technologies in the investigation and exploitation of Cultural Heritage. The registrations to the master are open until December 15, 2012.
More info are available on the official webpage: http://www.istitutoficlu.org/open-archaeo/.

We (Arc-Team) will partecipate to the master, teaching the use of FLOSS in archaeology and focusing the attention on ArcheOS. It will be also a nice opportunity to work together with Luca Mandolesi (adArte) and Enzo Cocca (CGT), developers of pyArchInit, to try to better integrate their tool in a specific deb package (untill now we added pyArchInit into an experimental ArcheOS package together with CADtools and BobMax's VTP extensions for QGIS).