One of the projects demonstrated at the Data Sans Frontieres conference last week was the English Heritage and ALGAO backed project known as Heritage Gateway. This is intended to be:
A prototype website was first made available in April 2006 after a year of planning and development. This provided access to a boundary map of England’s Historic Environment Records, with contact information and news articles as well as local education and outreach project information.
A mechanism to cross-search live local and national datasets has been developed for the website from May 2007. More datasets are being linked to this search as the project progresses.
The website is slowly adding more HERs to it’s cross search mechanism, and is mostly East Anglian at present.
I think that the Scheme should also be signed up to it, and I’ll be working on this shortly if I can get the details from Cat at EH. There has to be a one stop shop for searching the Historic Environment, it seems stupid that we are the only archaeological organisation with a data snapshot of England & Wales!
Other things that were quite cool at the Conference included LP Archaeology’s work on the Fasti project of Mediterranean archaeological projects, the fantastic SWISH project in Scotland and the various theoretical talks that were talked through during the day. Definitely one of the more interesting conferences I have been to for a while and it was nice to meet people such as Tom Goskar, Mia Rudge and of course all the HER people.
If Crispin reads this from Exegesis, let’s talk about transferring data…..
OpenCalais helped to tag this with: cross search mechanism • cross-search live local • Mediterranean • Mia Rudge • Scotland • Tom Goskar • United Kingdom • Wales
Possibly related posts: Data Sans Frontières: web portals and the historic environment • MIDAS XML Schema - PAS • Portable Antiquities Conference 2007 •
