TAG: Transatlantic Archaeology Gateway

FAIN: PX-50022-09

Arizona State University (Tempe, AZ 85281-3670)
John B. Howard (Project Director: March 2009 to October 2009)
Keith Kintigh (Project Director: October 2009 to September 2011)

The development of tools for trans-Atlantic cross-searching and semantic interoperability between the two major archives of born-digital archaeological data in the United States and United Kingdom.

The TAG project aims to develop an infrastructure to support, bring together and enhance digital content funded in the USA and England/Wales. It will build initially on existing web services registries maintained by the ADS for the historic environment sector in Europe and extends these for North American usage. A web services application will then be developed to create a standards-compliant cross-search facility for metadata records held by ADS (for the UK) and tDAR (for the USA) covering the archaeology of England and the United States. In a second stage a richer and deeper web services cross-search facility will be developed for faunal remains databases in England and the USA, providing an architecture to enable deep data mining as well as a valuable research tool for archaeologists in the UK and USA. Having been established in two national digital archive services the long-term sustainability and promotion of the service is also secured for future development and enhancement.