Guidelines for the Archaeological Map of Tuscany: Some Issues and Experiences

Regione Toscana recently delivered guidelines for the archaeological map of Tuscany in the aim of fulfilling both administrative and research needs. Format proposed in 1995 by CIDOC has been modified and enhanced, especially to represent chronological data in a more compact and formal way, and to add room for additional information. Wherever possible, normalisation of language is achieved by controlled dictionaries or thesauri. The main goals have been scientific correctness, ease of use, coherence with national and international standards, and portability. Putting information in the right spacio-temporal context has been addressed as an important goal. In light of portability of data, and considering some limitations of traditional GIS, we decided to clearly separate basic cartographic information from description of sites, that are georeferenced and have their own geometric properties stored as attributes. Comparison with national standards showed that there are many similarities, but some information is more adequately represented in our layout. Anyway, the two formats can generally be reconciled. Document is conceived as a structured document. To accommodate multiple or uncertain values and to reduce atomisation of information, syntactic rules drive the writing of the field content in some cases, so making the layout more flexible, readable and usable. The whole system is based upon well-established technologies and methods (DBMS, IRS, GIS), while Hypermedia approach and XML are used as unifying technologies. A test has been conducted upon data from Provincia di Livorno.