Towards Archaeo-informatics: Scientific data management for archaeobiology

Abstract

In this short paper we outline a novel and rich application domain for scientific data management: Archaeobiology. We give a short introduction to the key quests and issues in this research domain and derive a list of data management and data analysis tasks that requires original contributions from the Computer Science community and can initiate the birth of a new research discipline which we call Archaeo-Informatics. Furthermore, we describe a prototype for scientific data management called OSSOBOOK that meets many of the identified requirements of this application domain. In particular, OSSOBOOK is a distributed database system specially designed for Archaeobiology data management and analysis. Finally we give some future perspectives which is intended to serve as input for novel challenges for the Computer Science community. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.