Computing, GIS and Archaeology in the UK

…Actually no one who commented on last week’s post, though thanks for all the great suggestions!

In the end we went for ZooOS, suggested by Jeremy Ottevanger on the Antiquist Mailing List (though the capitalisation is all ours). We like it because it’s got mixed etymological roots, coming from both Greek (zoo =  greek for animals) and Roman (os = bone in latin) but also because it has that essential Open Source ring to it. It’s pronounced “zeus” by the way…

Now we have a name, we also have a launchpad site!

Thanks again for all the suggestions- we think we might borrow one or two of them for other projects, so watch this space!

We are about to start work on an open source database for recording animal bones on archaeological sites, but we can’t think of a name for it! So- crowd-sourcing and all that- I thought I’d open it out to people to come up with suggestions (clean and polite only or we’ll be terribly disappointed with you). I guess we might even be able to scrape together a prize for the one we choose, if you like second-hand conference schwag! You’ll certainly get credited if we choose you so your name will live on for posterity. How about that?

So- suggestions in the comments, or you can contact me using the form, whatever you like…

Not wanting to miss out on the whole discussion about data formats, I was surprised to see people give up their control of their data quite so easily, as this comment and following post seem to suggest that we should. Imagine if we ceded so much control to the other people that sell us products. Software companies are only glorified shopkeepers, in the same way that people who sell us televisions and cars are. However (if we have any sense) we don’t allow car salesmen to dictate where we drive, or television salesmen to dictate what we watch. We have allowed software vendors to lull us into believing that they are allowed to dictate what we do with our data. Sorry, but no. That’s what the open approach is all about- remaining in control of our data. At the risk of seeming overly dramatic, anything else is apathy.

Three good articles on IT/Open Source that I caught this week:

• Cory Doctorow writing in the Harvard Business Review on IT versus users. I sit on both sides of the IT fence from time to time, as both user and administrator. I can see both sides of the argument, and I hope we do give people the chance to experiment, but for every heretic there’s also the total nutter who infects all the pcs with viruses…
• Useful article on selling open source ideas from Og Maciel. Ignore the comments that degenerate quickly into a “my linux is better than yours” argument- again completely unconstructive and besides the point in this case, and focus on the article, which is a useful round-up of what you should focus on to get your idea out there to as many people as possible.
• The Guardian on the rise of open source, and in particular the big companies switching over. I could have done with this article at the AGI Open Source day really- to convince the naysayers that you don’t have to be a maverick archaeology unit to make the switch.