ARCHAEOLOGICAL MAPS GEO-REFERENCING AND INTERROGATION BY ADVANCED COMPUTER GIS SOFTWARE

The rapid development of information technology has affected many of the archaeological science related disciplines and approaches. The use of information technology in Archaeology is functional mainly in three thematic classes: field research, data interpretation, archaeological heritage management and protection. The three classes are heavily influenced by aspects of the data encoding, database, computer-aided statistics, image processing, CAD tools, multimedia, virtual reality and artificial intelligence. Other fields of application concern the use of geomatics and recent tools and technologies such as laser scanners, satellite positioning, digital photogrammetry, digital mapping and geographic information systems. The latter technology, the GIS, was placed at the heart of the archaeological map computerization project. It’s a well-known fact that one of the main features of GIS is to integrate two-way alphanumeric information into geometric elements. The information, structured according to the traditional entity-relationship model (ERD), refers to the individual archaeological sites, each one localized and represented in a vector format. This project aimed at abstracting the management and retrieval of data from a common DBMS, involving two lines of implementation, each one independent from the other in terms of purpose, but each one referring to the same API level and technology behind the management system. The first line of development relates to the integration of archaeological data in a GIS using traditional client-server architecture. The second line relates to the construction of a stand-alone GIS application.