Since 2005 the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (ISAC) provides public access to information about the diverse research and object-based collections by means of their integrated database (idb). As part of this renowned collection, Camel Lab has published more than 8000 digitized maps and satellite imagery, which have been of enormous interest for researchers not only from North America, but has been of immense interest for archaeologists from all over the world.
During the past months Researchers Dominik Lukas and Ruyoang Tu at ISAC have been working in collaboration with the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) on integrating Camel Lab’s wealth of data with the alliance’s geoportal in order to make the maps and satellite imagery widely accessible. While this collection could until now only be consulted through the search functionality hosted on the institute’s website, BTAA allows for these data to be explored together with the more than 50 000 geo-referenced datasets from its partner institutions like Michigan State University, Pennsylvania State University, Purdue or the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
All this was achieved by mapping the original data structure of the ISAC integrated database to the geoBTAA metadata schema, which involved a detailed analysis of the existing data, developing a transformation procedure to accommodate the images and maps following the BTAA’s shared specifications and coding a new interface in order to ultimately allow for the geoportal harvesting ISAC’s datasets. Aside from the enormously heightened visibility of ISAC’s data as part of the Big10 alliance, the geoportal also allows for searching these maps and images within a webgis, a functionality that has been missing until now.
The data can be queried through the geoportal at https://geo.btaa.org/ by narrowing down the complete dataset to those items coming from Camel. This can either be achieved by using the advanced search functionality on the portal, selecting the Center for Ancient Middle Eastern Landscapes as “Provider” or simply following this link: https://geo.btaa.org/?f%5Bdct_isPartOf_sm%5D%5B%5D=12d-04. Obviously Camel’s maps and images remain searchable as well through the original interface at https://isac-idb.uchicago.edu/.
We thank Foy Scalf as head of ISAC’s Research Archives and its IDB Project, Rose Pezzuti Dyer for developing a dedicated interface for automating data exchange between the IDB and BTAA Geoportal, Cecilia Smith for connecting CAMEL with Big Ten, as well as Karen Majewicz of the BTAA Geoportal Project.