Researchers at Brown and Hofstra Universities Use Information Builders Technology to Study Bronze Age Pottery

Snapshot

Organization Researchers at Hofstra University (Long Island, NY) and Brown University (Providence, RI).

The Challenge Reduce the cumbersome process of matching archeological data to images of excavated objects; create tools for analyzing and comparing the data to facilitate research.

The Strategy Create a Web-based system for storing, presenting, and analyzing archeological data and associated images, with user-defined parameters to simplify usage.

The Results An easy, straightforward, and highly visual approach to statistical research; new types of analysis and deductive reasoning to identify and catalog ancient pottery; a model for researchers in other domains.

Information Builders Solution WebFOCUS.

Centuries ago, in the region now known as Italy, a woman sat under an olive tree and shaped clay into a pot. She gave the vessel a long neck to facilitate pouring and fashioned handles to make it easier to carry. She could not have imagined that her handiwork would someday be the subject of scholarly study – that the length of the pot's neck, the shape of its body, and the design of its handles would provide clues to its origin.

Today, researchers use Information Builders' WebFOCUS to analyze, identify, and catalogue these ancient pots, leveraging its powerful reporting capabilities to sift through mountains of archeological data.

"Whenever you need to combine a lot of data and images, you invariably need to spend time condensing information and matching the appropriate visuals with their textual descriptions in the database," explains Susan Lukesh, an archeological researcher, who holds a Ph.D. from Brown University and currently serves as an associate provost at Hofstra University. "WebFOCUS allows us to perform statistical calculations, analyze large data sets, manipulate images, and share the results via reports that can be easily distributed over the Internet or a private intranet."

Unearthing New Techniques

As someone who has devoted her life to the study of Bronze Age pottery, it's not surprising that Susan Lukesh is not inherently interested in technology for its own sake. However, she has been using computers for decades to analyze the data generated in her archeological studies. "As an undergraduate student in the late 1960s, I had the idea of using the power of the computer to collapse archeological data down and weed out noise," she recalls. "Archeologists today face the laborious challenge of matching pictures and illustrations to data. WebFOCUS enables us to easily make visual comparisons while enabling new types of analysis and deductive reasoning."

Lukesh's experience with database technology stretches back more than 30 years. She was introduced to computers as part of an innovative computing curriculum at Brown University, which gave her a glimpse of the computer's potential for classification and analysis. Later, as a graduate student, she began to develop a coding schema for ancient pottery using punch cards.

The 1970s found Susan Lukesh excavating in southern Italy. By the early 1980s, she was working full-time as a systems analyst at Brown University designing software programs such as a student information system. Summer vacations took her to excavations in Sicily, where she used one of the first IBM PCs to store archeological data. "The first PCs were huge," she muses, "but they were portable enough to enable onsite data-entry using the BASIC programming language."

In 1980, Lukesh was introduced to Information Builders' FOCUS, an application-development and reporting environment that was quickly gaining popularity in both the public and private sectors. She used the software in her work on Brown's student information system, as well as to enhance her techniques for archeological research. "For someone who had come from punch-card systems, FOCUS was a revelation," she says. "I was thrilled to find such a powerful and flexible tool."

Lukesh relied on a FOCUS database while working in Sicily throughout the 1980s and 1990s, storing information from excavation sites on a laptop computer. However, certain aspects of the research were still cumbersome. "Before WebFOCUS, I had to keep drawings and photographs separate from the database," she explains. "I could use the database to condense a data set, but I still had to manually locate images and pull them into the paper record. WebFOCUS has enabled me to overcome that manual process."

Digging Deeper

Lukesh learned about WebFOCUS through her ongoing interactions with Information Builders. She quickly perceived its ability to provide new types of reporting, analysis, and information-delivery capabilities, all while leveraging the existing FOCUS infrastructure that had become so fundamental to her research. Information Builders helped Lukesh create a Web-based application that combines statistical data with scanned photos and drawings of pottery.

"Since our data was already stored in a FOCUS database, adopting WebFOCUS was a logical move," she explains. "WebFOCUS users can reuse existing FOCUS reports and applications, avoiding the modification that other Web-based reporting solutions require."

Today, working with R. Ross Holloway, a professor at Brown University, Lukesh uses WebFOCUS to create and review the archeological data, drilling down and sorting the results as they wish. Instead of manually sorting through hundreds of photos and illustrations, they can perform searches on distinct attributes and compare multiple pictures on a single page.

"WebFOCUS provides a very flexible environment that allows us to do new types of analysis," Lukesh says. "For example, a user might want to see all the pots that have a long neck and a globular body without handles. WebFOCUS can take those specific parameters, access the database, and present pictures of pots that exhibit those characteristics. This brings a visual component to our work of comparing and dating Bronze Age pottery."

WebFOCUS Maintain allows Lukesh to update the database directly from her Web browser, without using database tools. Commonly referred to as a closed-loop business intelligence system, Maintain includes an object-oriented 4GL to simplify complex programming tasks. Operational data in any database on any platform can be updated directly from an Excel spreadsheet or simple Web browser.

"One of the great things about this application is that people don't need any special software to view the data, " Lukesh says. "It is a good example of a shared research application."

For example, researchers at the National Museum of Prehistory in Rome are interested in using the system to collaborate via the Internet. They can access the WebFOCUS site using any standard Web browser. Additionally, with proper licensing and authorization, these remote researchers could use WebFOCUS Maintain to update the system with new images and data. WebFOCUS has built-in security that can be used to restrict access based on each user's role within the research and analysis process.

Parallel Evolution

Lukesh continues to add data, images, and capabilities to the system, enhancing its value as a research tool. As more and more people see its potential, she believes it could be used as a model for other areas of inquiry. "The application is immensely expandable to other domains, such as ancient coins," she says. "A colleague of mine who specializes in Bronze Age cloak pins said that 30 years of research could have been accelerated by this system."

That's no surprise to Lukesh, who has a unique ability to combine scholarly communication with advances in information technology. "The Internet and digital communication are changing the way the academic community functions," she says. "For example, the Los Alamos Archive, arXiv, is a repository of over 36,000 mathematics and computer science articles. Other repositories are springing up all over the world to help scholars share their material. Our application is a great example of how technology can facilitate that. It enables worldwide access with built-in security, dependable performance, and the ability to analyze data and create reports – capabilities that are valuable to researchers in any field."