ATOR (Arc-Team Open Research).
The blog spreads tests, problems and results of Arc-Team research in archaeology, following the guidelines of the OpArc (Open Archaeology) project.
Working on archaeological documentation requires different types of equipment a techniques. Watch in this video some of them in action, while we are continuing to work on the picturesquely situated site of Torre dei Sicconi.
this fast post is intended to be an overview of the new open source software Polygontool, an application our friend +Szabolcs Köllö (aka +keulemaster) developed for Arc-Team. This tool is helping us in defining an automatic data processing protocol, in order to directly convert raw data files (collected with RTK GPS or total station during survey campaigns) into GIS readable formats. Currently the tool is under an hard test phase, being used during an interreg project (leaded by +Rupert Gietl) about the Great War between the Austrian and Italian border, but it had already positive effects on our work-flow, reducing the time expensive operations of manual data processing. The short video below is a demo to explain how the software works and what it can do.
The source code (in Python) can be found on github and it is already usable (if you want to test it) and open to contributions (if you want to help us in the development). Currently the configuration files (in the "config" folder) are optimized for our interreg project, but you can, of course, modify the terminology to make them fit to any other archaeological database.
Soon I will post other reports about Polygontool. By now I hope this preview will be useful for some of you (and maybe for us, if someone will join the project).
today I had to convert some raw total station data from Trimble file format (.are) into something simpler and more readable, like a csv file (Comma Separated Value), in order to further process my points and load them inside a GIS. To perform this operation I used a specific software which you can find in ArcheOS: Total Open Station.
This tool is developed by +Stefano Costa and Luca Bianconi. Here you can find the official website.
I record a short videotutorial about the file conversion. You can see it in the video below.
today I am working on data elaboration of an archaeological excavation. I decided to record a short videotutorial to show how to perform a very simple query in OpenJUMP (which is a topic I am often asked to explain during lessons about archeology and open source). Before to start, I'll write a short introduction regarding the processing of this data, just to understand why I need to perform this kind of query.
I worked on this excavations collecting all the data in a local system (with simple 3D Cartesian coordinates), because the job was an emergency archeology project and I did not have the time to set up a geographic coordinate system on the field, before the construction site began. Just at the and of the excavation, I could come with a RTK GPS, to collect some Ground Control Points (GCP) in UTM WGS84. This is the reason why in this time, when I am processing the data, I had to put together all the daily total station downloads in a single cvs file, which I georeferenced in OpenJUMP, using the GCP I collected with the GPS. The problem is that now I will have to separate again the single points, grouping them according to their function (e.g. points for photomapping of area 1, height points of the same area, points for SfM georeferencing, find-points and so on...). To do this operation, I will simply use OpenJUMp (where I loaded and georeferenced the csv file), performing a query on the attribute (the name) of cumulative vector layer , which will tell me where are the the points I need. In this way I can select in the GIS the features I am looking for and put them in a new vector level, copying the db schema of the cumulative layer (name, y, x, z, code). At the end of the process, I will have single separated vector files which I will use in the next steps of data processing (photomapping, 3D, ecc...).
Here is the videotutorial I uploaded in the ArcheOS tutorila wiki (rom Insbruck University):
