The somewhat misnamed Archaeological Computing Laboratory provides support to staff and students at the Univerrsity of Sydney across a broad range of Humanities disciplines (and beyond), particularly Archaeology, History, Anthropology and Linguistics.

Our principal focus is on the development of online databases, web mapping and academic social bookmarking, research into the modelling of historical events and timeline visualisation ("Rethinking Timelines" ARC Linkage project with Macquarie Library P/L and the Australian National Maritime Museum), research into the history and archaeology of Angkor ("Greater Angkor Project" - ARC Discovery), and heritage landscape management ("Living with Heritage" ARC Linkage with UNESCO, APSARA, GML P/L and others).

Director: Dr Ian Johnson. Staff: ~9 FTE

Relevant links (including software developed by the ACL)

• ACL home page

   

  Badly in need of revision as of July 2007, work is about to start on a redesign and update campaign.

   

• TimeMap (1997 - )

  TimeMap is our long-running project developing distributed web-based spatio-temporal mapping and map animation. It is operates as a cross-platform client-server, standalone applet or desktop application, and can thus be used on web sites or CD-ROM without prior installation. Latest developments (July 2007) include user-defined layout and styling of the components (map, legend, time bar, play controls, labelling) of the Flash animations generated. TimeMap is Open Source under GNU GPL on SourceForge.

   

• Heurist (2005 - )

  Heurist is a free online database service which stores internet bookmarks, bibliographic references and research data in a single integrated database, allowing them to be linked, annotated, tagged, selected and published live to the web. Heurist will be released to Open Source under GNU GPL in 2008.

   

• FieldHelper (2006 - )

  FieldHelper is a cross-platform Java application designed to manage digital files (primarily, but not necessarily, collected in the field), allow easy setting of metadata including location and spatially-deteremined categories (through digitisation on a Google map), and create METS packages for submission to a repository such as Fedora (implemented) or dSpace (in progress July 07). The version available for download here is an early prototype and has since been substantially restructured and extended. Please contact us directly for updates. FieldHelper is Open Source under GNU GPL but has not yet been placed on SourceForge.

   

• iSpheres & ArchImage (2004-5)

  ISpheres provide a distributed interoperable solution to serving a range of data - from images, sound, video and text to databases and GIS datasets. Note: iSpheres development was taken over by the Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories, which funded our intial work, but the web site has not been kept up to date. It is hoped that this can be rectified 3rd quarter 2007 as we are trying to re-engage with the project. iSpheres is Open Source under GNU GPL.