Open data and closed lines. Reflections on the management of cad drawings and rdbms from the open datasets of massaciuccoli romana excavations

Abstract

This paper concerns the workflow used to create a GIS project of a villa – or mansion – located in the archaeological area of Massaciuccoli (Lucca, Italy), for spatial analysis. The first part of this article describes the data collected during an excavation carried out from 2010-2012, which was released as open data by the Massaciuccoli Romana project. This dataset contains the CAD drawing, the RDBMS databases with the context sheets and the quantification of findings. The second part explains the technical steps performed for the data cleaning, as well as the final import of spatial, qualitative and quantitative data in an open-source GIS environment, which allowed for explorative spatial analysis. The last section of the paper discusses the questions that emerged with data reuse, highlighting the importance of available open data in archaeology and the time-consuming data-cleaning procedure. Once again, the paper underlines the different scopes of computer-aided design (CAD) and geographic information system (GIS) software and, consequently, the awareness that archaeologists should have of them when they choose which one better fits their needs and data reuse.