School of ComputingFaculty of Engineering

Head in the clouds: Improving knowledge by engaging with the web

David Stott

Introduction

• Conversations in Bucharest at AARG 2011

• Data proliferation

• Limited curatorial resources

• This presentation will look at how researchers in other fields address this

• Citizen Science

• Cloud services and applications

Motivation

• We are acquiring more imagery every day

• Satellite imagery

• Aerial photographs

• Existing archives are enormous

• For example; TARA / NCP in the UK holds 10,000,000+ images

• A large proportion of these images are of archaeological value

• Most of the people working in aerial archaeology in Europe are in this room

• Are we only scratching the surface?

Example 1: Foldit

• http://fold.it/

• A puzzle game based on protein folding

• 236,000+ users

• Used to examine protein structure

• Produces models good enough to design new anti-retroviral drugs

• Successfully mapped the structure of a protein causing HIV in rhesus monkeys

• Despite attempts to resolve this computationally this has been unsolved for over 15 years

• Solved within 3 months on Foldit

Example 2: Galaxy Zoo Hubble

• http://www.galaxyzoo.org/

• Maps and classifies galaxies from the Hubble Space Telescope Imagery

• 250,000+ users

• 60,000,000+ Classifications

• Improved understanding of how galaxies function

Carl Sagan

Carl Sagan

WATCH COSMOS

Example 3: Old weather

• http://www.oldweather.org/

• Digitising historic weather measurements from ship’s logs

• Helps improve climate predictions

• Very high temporal (<daily) resolution with positions all over the world

• 238 ships

• 150 completed so far

• 89,000+ pages digitised

Further examples

• Ancient Lives

• Digitising Egyptian papyri

• http://ancientlives.org/

• Moon Zoo

• Mapping the moon’s surface from Lunar Reconnaissance orbiter

• 2,000,000 images classified so far

• http://www.moonzoo.org/

Has anyone done this in aerial archaeology?

• National Geographic: Valley of the Kahns Project

• http://exploration.nationalgeographic.com/mongolia/

• Users tag features on GeoEye imagery

• 10,591 users

• 627,057 images classified

• 1,000,000 tags

• Very simple

• Point based tags

Why do people do this?

"Galaxy Zoo volunteers do real work. They’re not just passively running something on their computer and hoping that they’ll be the first person to

find aliens. They have a stake in science that comes out of it, which means that they are now interested in what we do with it, and what we find.”

Why do people do this?

• Contribute: I am excited to contribute to original scientific research.

• Learning: I find the site and forums helpful in learning about astronomy.

• Discovery: I can look at galaxies that few people have seen before.

• Community: I can meet other people with similar interests.

• Teaching: I find Galaxy Zoo to be a useful resource for teaching.

• Beauty: I enjoy looking at the beautiful galaxy images.

• Fun: I had a lot of fun categorizing the galaxies.

• Vastness: I am amazed by the vast scale of the universe.

• Zoo: I am interested in the Galaxy Zoo project.

• Astronomy: I am interested in astronomy.

From Raddick et al 2009

Would people do this for archaeology?

Short answer; YES:

• Local groups

• http://www.westlothianarchaeology.org.uk/

• Press stories of people finding archaeological sites on Google Earth

• RCAHMS

• http://www.rcahms.gov.uk/scotlands-rural-past.html

• Portable Antiquities Scheme

• http://finds.org.uk/

What could we do with this?

• Geo-referencing and tagging of imagery

• Identification of potential archaeological features

• Ground truthing

• Cropmark monitoring

• Education

What would we need to do to achieve this?

• Open our data

• Provide training

• http://www.moonzoo.org/how_to_take_part

• Build and engage with a community

• Must treat users as collaborators and not consumers

• Relationships must be reciprocal

• “Gamification”? e.g. FoldIt

What would we need to do to achieve this?

• Develop an infrastructure

• Most of the software exists already

• Web mapping e.g. WFS, WMS

• Open StreetMap

• Mapwarper: http://mapwarper.net/

• Zooniverse

• Back-end for Old Weather, Galaxy Zoo, Moon Zoo and Ancient Lives

• Will accept proposals for projects- call deadline January 2012

• Citizen science alliance

• http://www.citizensciencealliance.org/philosophy.html

“OK sounds good, but what are the problems with your digital utopia?”

• Organisational inertia

• Hostility to open data

• Silo mentality

• Ethics

• Exposing sites to looting

• We need to deal with this…

Finally, some interesting tools that help us do this

• Smartphones

• GPS

• Camera

• Attribute data

• Essentially a sensor in

your pocket

• Epicollect

• http://www.epicollect.net/

Photosynth

• http://photosynth.net/default.aspx

• Photogrammetry for the masses

• Extraction of pointclouds

• As easy as uploading photos to facebook

• Quick and dirty

Conclusion:

“If we build it, they will come”