Furuta Richard Texas Engineering Experiment Station Mediation of Research Group Scholarly Activities in a Digital Library: Steps towards the Nautical Archaeology Digital Library
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 develop an initial digital library of artifacts gathered in the domain of Nautical Archaeology and use it to examine and build tools and applications for research and scholarly practice in the area. The project will design, implement, and evaluate a framework that will: 1) efficiently catalog, store, and manage artifacts and ship remains along its associated data and information produced by an underwater archeological excavation, 2) integrate heterogeneous data sources from different media to facilitate research work and handle uncertainty in data and structure, 3) incorporate historic sources to help in the study of current artifacts, 4) develop visualization tools to help researchers manipulate, observe, study, and analyze artifacts and their relationships; and 5) develop algorithm and visualization based mechanisms for ship reconstruction, i.e., to determine where recovered pieces and fragments fit in a whole.. The project will draw its materials from an 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. Gathering artifacts from the field provides the basic data that drives many areas of scientific inquiry. While a major focus of today's digital libraries research is concerned with collecting, organizing and managing archives of diverse topical data, research focused in specific topic areas can produce digital libraries that functionally go beyond mere information warehousing to support very specific tasks necessary for scholarship in a given topical area. The intellectual merit of this proposal is relevant to both Computer Science and Nautical Archaeology research agendas. The project's research has the potential for application within many areas of scientific study, particularly within those that incorporate aspects of fieldwork.
