International WODAN workshop October 6th, 2009
The international WODAN workshop was held on Tuesday 6th October 2009 to demonstrate the database to the wider community and receive valuable feedback for its continuing development.
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A morning of introductions to the work to date was followed by a practical session in which the charcoal database was trialled in small groups. The feedback received from these sessions was in-depth, specific to elements of the database, and very useful. Participants were also able to test out the database personally and discover how well their data would fit into the established model.
Presented at the morning session by Caroline Vermeeren and Kirsti Hänninen (our Dutch partners from BIAX-Consult) was a method to calculate charcoal saturation curves. This method created much interest as a graphical technique for determining when sufficient counting has been completed. Its application in backing up commercial requests for larger samples was enthusiastically recognised and its incorporation into the WODAN database is proposed.
The later afternoon session included presentations on related projects worldwide. Mitchell Power travelled from the US and introduced his Global Charcoal Database, a catalogue of palaeo-fire events. Although predominantly a charcoal quantification rather than identification database this project attracted much interest and the display of the data through animation was very well received. Issues such as creating a community around a database were also raised.
Rowin van Lanen introduced the Low Countries DCCD project which hosts the dendrochronology database TRiDaS which hopes to be on-line in September 2010. The importance of controlled vocabulary and thesauri was stressed here.
Rob Sands presented highlights from his database for artefacts from the Roman site of Vindolanda in England. The significance of ‘known unknowns’ and their position within a database was also explored.
Bettina Stefanini gave an introduction to her Irish pollen site database which uses Google Earth to pinpoint pollen sampling sites. This pollen database will come on-line at the end of this year.
Finally, Ingelise Stuijts presented Dominique Marguerie’s site database and ABCData database and turned thoughts towards the future of the WODAN project.
