DART is very fortunate to have two new colleagues. Dave Harrison and Raghavendra (Reddy) Mohan have joined the DART team on short term contracts. Reddy is following up on his DART MSc project from 2011 by doing further laboratory growth experiments and aiding another MSc student in replicating the 2011 experiments. It is hoped that Reddy’s work will lead to a collaborative publications with Professor Christine Foyer late in 2012.

Dave is a final year PhD student who is dealing with many of the data repository issues. This is principally focussed on developing a database back-end to hold the research data and Content Management System (CMS) to hold metadata about the raw research objects. The metadata for each deposited object which will be used for resource discovery and subsequent deposition in a domain data repository (likely to be the Archaeology Data Service or, possibly Figshare). An integrated spatial-database will be developed to hold all the sensor measurements, probably based on PostGres, which will contain structured facsimiles of the raw data in the CMS. Scripts will be generated that convert and import the raw data into the database. A web-visualization interface will be implemented (using a pre-existing framework) to allow users to undertake simple querying, data mining and data extraction from the database. Some of the data may be made available as Web Services that can be accessed by individuals or geosensor web harvesting engines. This is obviously a lot to consider and it is unlikely that Dave will have the time to implement everything. Time is likely to be one of Dave’s major problems and it is crucial that we make the most of Dave’s abilities while we can. I will help co-ordinate his activities with the students and others to ensure that bottlenecks or other issues don’t become a problem. One of the benefits from CAA is that Stuart Jeffrey (from the ADS) has invited us over to talk ‘repositories’. Thanks Stuart

Both Dave and Reddy have been given blog accounts and are encouraged to detail their activities on the blog or the methods section.