One site that’s been getting a lot of buzz lately, hosting multiple high-profile projects’ databases is Open Context (http://www.opencontext.org/)–so the answer to your second question is “yes.” But I don’t know whether anyone is using them yet for actual research.

Also, there’s been at least one serious attempt at general XML schema for archaeology, ArchaeoML (http://ochre.lib.uchicago.edu/index_files/ArchaeoML_Schema.htm). I haven’t had the chance to dig into it, and I don’t know if it’s still being developed, but it would be a good place for an interested archaeologist to start.

And as for Atom/RSS, in concert with a specialized XML interchange format, it might make a lot of sense for announcing changes. That is, let each project use its own database but create the tools (as Paul suggests) for exporting the data into a common XML schema, and use RSS to announce the availability of new data to all interested parties. That way, we could use best-of-breed solutions for data storage, data dissemination, and data sharing, without diluting the quality of any single component by mashing it all together.

Unfortunately, I doubt that a schema for the interchange of paleoanthro data would be useful for archy, or vice-versa.

Yeah, I think I didn’t clarify in the post that I’m not saying RSS is the format to do this. Rather, I think the way RSS is distributed and aggregated is the way paleoanthropological data needs to be shared. This has to be done with a new XML schema. The paleoanthropolgical community needs to sit down and agree upon a predetermined set of fields. Then people will need to just have their databases be exported and then published. Anyways, thanks for catching that!

I hope that paleoanthropologists will think about this way of executing their data sharing because having to reformat databases is a big pain in my opinion. Or also, if the big data portability initiative in the technology sector finds a better way, which I have faith they do, that they’ll use that model as a way of sharing paleoanthropological data.

Kambiz

Unfortunately, the definitions (schema) for RSS and Atom are far too simplistic and restricted to adequately represent all of the information paleoanthropologists would desire, so a custom XML schema should be developed.

Simple tools would also be needed to dump the contents of each specific database into the common formal XML files, but this is not a show-stopper. It could be managed as an open-source software effort.

There are a lot of anthropologists who are self-taught programmers, and a lot of programmers who are self-taught anthropologists… I’m sure there will be people available to do this.