40 years,

Описание: 40 years, 20:20 vision: why we still need domain-specific databases.
Ian Johnson

From 1980-87, at a time when DBase II was the go-to system, I developed Minark, a flexible database manager for archaeology used by several state site registers, various excavations and some non-archaeological projects. Its basic principle was to allow archaeologists to define their own structures and reports without programming, to modify them as needs changed, and to carry out some basic filtering and data exploration prior to exporting subsets to other programs for further analysis.

40 years later I am still developing (although I no longer do the programming) a flexible database manager, Heurist (HeuristNetwork.org), which follows the same basic philosophy. The scope has expanded to a broader Humanities remit, and the technology has changed – everything is web based and richly connected, with multimedia, web site generation and sophisticated searching and mapping built in – but the need for such software still exists despite the rise of the web and web services, the development of intuitive touchscreen interfaces, and the astonishing computing power and storage capacity in our pockets.

In this presentation I will look at the costs and risks of developing databases which are more than just spreadsheets, and the reason why targeted solutions (such as regionally-specific excavation data systems or museum management systems) are still very much in demand. Outside these well-defined applications more flexible, secure and user-configurable systems are needed to cope with the heterogeneity and continuous evolution of research and consulting requirements. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…

Presented on September 11 2020 as part of CAA Australasia Digital Archaeology Conference.

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