Open Source Computing and GIS in the UK

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…

I’ve been meaning to post for a while on Oxford Archaeology‘s Open Archaeology Project, also known as our “Open Ethos”, then what do you know, Joseph posts about it and says it so well that I might just as well repeat his post verbatim. I won’t though- then you might go and read the other blog, and wander around on the internet for a while finding out interesting new things . Pop back here when you’re done, if you like!

In short, “Open Archaeology” comprises three strands: open standards, open access, and open source. We see this  as the only logical way of fulfilling our remit as a commercial archaeological organisation, and an educational charity. Our job is to record the cultural remains that are damaged or destroyed by development. Our remit is to make those records available in perpetuity, to anyone who wants to see them. At the end of the day, pretty objects in museums are of little use without the background information that gives them context and fires the imagination.

While the three strands are not the same thing (as they are often made out to be), open data is useless without open standards and open software. Open software is useless without open data and open standards. You get the idea.

I’ve recently been asked if our commitment to open source software was a financial decision, or an ethical one. It’s both, I suppose, but our Open Archaeology project should show you that it’s part of a bigger thing than simply saving money on licenses.

In that serindipitous way that rss readers work, two posts came to my attention over the last couple of days. The first was from Gavin, about problems that occurred when the South African Government failed to keep control of the source code on two GIS programmes that they had developed. When contracts end, or funding dries up, if you don’t have complete control over your programmes then you might as well start rebuilding them now.

Today my fellow trouble-maker and open source advocate Joseph reported back on a Freedom of Information request that he made to English Heritage, the leading heritage body here in the UK, regarding the long-term sustainability of their (proprietary) Intrasis site recording software. I quote:

“Intrasis is developed by the Swedish National Heritage Board
(Riksantikvarieämbetet), this organisation has a long-term commitment to
the continued use and development of this software package. Our present
contract is for four years, and the use of the package will be the subject of
a post-implementation review after two years.”

So, lucky we only need to keep the records for 6 years then. After all, it’s not like they are the only record remaining of the archaeology that has now been dug up. Oh, wait…

(For those of you not from the UK- you might not know about the super-fab WhatDoTheyKnow site. It’s for submitting Freedom of Information Requests to UK public authorities)

This is all extra serindipitous (how often do you get to use that twice in one blog post?) because I’m trying to write my talk for the AGI 2008 conference at the moment. I want to try and get across that there are just as many, if not more, “risks” in a proprietary software solution as in open source. I suspect that government agencies aren’t ever really going to be taken to task over these decisions and this potential waste of public money unless we can get open source software understood at the highest of levels. Well, it’s a challenge…

Two Mondays ago I came into work in the morning to find one of my windows servers no longer booted. The short version  is that all the data was fine, but the windows partition had got itself corrupted. I now have a linux server, and know more about samba and winbind than I ever thought I would need to. No big deal, you might say, but it has been a learning experience for me, and I’m very grateful to my colleagues for their patience whilst I dropped everything else and flailed around in the dark trying to learn the intricacies of samba config from scratch.

I do have one thing to say… if you’re using winbind, remember that it can take at least 20 minutes from startup to work properly. If I’d known that a couple of days ago I’d have posted this much sooner, if you get my drift!

Things that have crossed my path over the last few days that are worth a look:

• Duh everyone has heard about this one already- Radiohead go open source and geospatial. If I liked their music, they’d be my favourite geeky band for sure. I’m certainly going to use this as light-hearted example of fun GIS things in courses.
• Leif finally posts again with a very thought-provoking article on misrepresentation and whether archaeologists should provide support to the military in conflict situations. It’s quite long, but worth hanging on for, and as archaeologists we need to think about this kind of thing if we are to be taken seriously and have any chance of protecting the cultural heritage of areas under conflict.
• Leif (again) and Paul and Tom from Wessex Archaeology finally have their paper on computers in archaeology publically available. Go read!
• There’s also a couple of interesting white papers floating about. Activestate have one that debunks 10 myths about open source for businesses. I think it could be more positive about open source, and in particular the strength of the community and the lack of vendor lock-in, but (let’s be honest here) they are selling support. Finally, Microsoft have a beginners guide to map projection- it’s a nasty aspx link so apologies if it dies. It’s a shame that it’s not available as a pdf (not that you can’t save it as one, of course).