We are developing a digital library of artifacts gathered in the domain of Nautical Archaeology and will use it to examine tools and their application in the day-to-day scholarly practice in the area. The specific goal of the project is to design, implement, and evaluate a framework that will:
- efficiently catalog, store, and manage artifacts and ship remains along its associated data and information produced by an underwater archeological excavation
- integrate heterogeneous data sources from different media to facilitate research work and handle uncertainty in data and structure
- incorporate historic sources to help in the study of current artifacts
- develop visualization tools to help researchers manipulate, observe, study, and analyze artifacts and their relationships
- develop algorithm and visualization based mechanisms for ship reconstruction, i.e., to determine where recovered pieces and fragments fit in a whole.
The project is a collaborative effort of researchers in Texas A&M University's Center for the Study of Digital Libraries (CSDL) and Nautical Archaeology Program (NAP). The project will draw its materials from the extensive collection of artifacts gathered from a shipwreck in Portugal as well as the extensive archives collected at the NAP during field studies over the past 32 years.
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. IIS-0534314. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.