Principle investigators Keith Kintigh and K. Selçuk Candan recently secured a NSF Information Integration and Informatics small project grant for their proposal, “One Size Does Not Fit All: Empowering the User with User-Driven Integration.” Responding to the inefficiency of current schemes, which sacrifice possible data uses in order to produce early integration, User-Driven Integration (UDI) is an approach that takes advantage of expert opinions from the users of integrated data. Scientists and decision-makers have different needs and expectations from data integration operations, and their input will improve data management in complex systems.

UDI also benefits students: undergraduate Honors capstone projects and graduate computer science courses will be formed to test and improve the approach. tDAR data structure is in line with the UDI approach, which values user feedback over structured data, integrating dynamic and variable data sets which may mesh in a variety of ways.

Digital Antiquity continuously works to update tDAR software as a part of its mission to improve digital data preservation and storage. The Cadaster Release, from Winter 2010-2011, focused primarily on supporting the ingest of National Archaeological Database (NADB) metadata as well as enhancement of existing user workflows. Increasing usability is a crucial method to improving the overall efficiency of data entry and management. Key changes to the software include:

  • Previously, the relationship between a record and the project it was filed into required the record to automatically copy all of the data from the project to each record in that project.  With this release, this action is now both explicit, and optional, allowing selective “inheritance” section-by-section within a tDAR record.  Added support for institutional authorship in addition to the existing personal authorship
  • Added the ability to record notes and identifiers (such as contract number) to the schema and data entry forms
  • Redesigned the search results display to allow for easier review of records and to enable sorting
  • Enabled tDAR to make better use of geospatial data specified by the user including automatic assignment of geographic keywords based on the site coordinates specified
  • Developed tools and infrastructure to bulk import XML records into tDAR
  • Added visualization tool for ontologies
  • Introduced display of thumbnails for PDFs and images stored within tDAR
  • Enabled easy replacement of Datasets, Ontologies, and Coding Sheets within tDAR without forcing the user to entirely remap data records
  • Enhanced keyword searching to index and search general terms as well as specific ones, i.e., “Paleo-Indian” would be indexed in addition to the terms “Clovis” or “Folsom”.
  • Support for synonyms and Display Labels in tDAR ontologies
  • Significant performance enhancements throughout the system using NADB metadata records to test
  • Support for the TAG (Transatlantic Archaeological Gateway), a SOAP-based interface used by the UK Archaeological Data Service (ADS) released in Beta form