Recent trends in mobile GIS indicate that crowdsourcing applications are becoming more and more important in different industries. We believe that this process will occur in archaeological field prospection as well. In fact, smartphones have already become a popular tool for archaeological survey. But the question is whether the trend is headed into right direction? What are the threats and opportunities connected with the democratisation of such tools?
The main goal of the SIG is to start a broad discussion on this topic amongst international experts with the aim of establishing standards and guidelines that may serve as “good practice” for Mobile GIS usage in archaeology. Within “good practice” we would like to explore topics such as:
- Why Mobile GIS is necessary for archaeology;
- What could be studied via Mobile GIS and how;
- What could be efficient workflows for data collection of sites and other landscape elements (mobile applications);
- How to use mobile GIS at different geographic scale of details: Intra-site and off-site;
- What archaeologist expect from Mobile GIS cooperation with other tools, such as: GNSS, geodetic equipment, drones and sensors;
- What is the ground-truth of collected data (precision, accuracy and quality of crowdsourcing) and what is needed for collection of archaeological datasets;
- Security of the archaeological data while using Mobile GIS applications (data loss and theft; access of the data to the public; sharing of the data);
- The problem of crowd data collection, how to check the quality of collected data Additionally, this group will be directly involved in technical testing of newly available applications that improve fieldwork efficiency and organize “hands-on” workshops.
The long-term goal of the SIG is to try to influence the industry to create tools that archaeologists need. The SIG would also be directly involved in the development of new applications for archaeologists that could be used in field survey. We encourage all interested CAA members to join the SIG. We hope that sharing our field survey experience will help to exchange ideas and standardize survey strategies that rely on Mobile GIS.
SIG Coordinators:
- Stefano Campana
- Julia M. Chyla
- Nazarij Buławka
If you are interested in joining this SIG, please contact the coordinators.