Nabonidus Release Beta 1.1

We have just published a minor version of Nabonidus with these extra bits:

• We have added a Reports page. There are a couple of reports in there that you can run against your excavation data but we hope to add many more so please give us your suggestions for reports you would find useful. (We do have an issue pending with our hosting service regarding the PDF report so you may get a security error when you run it - we apologise for that but hopefully our hosting service will fix it soon).
• We fixed a bug on the Area Elevations page that stopped you saving data (thanks to Steve W from www.online-archaeology.co.uk).
• We added a link to our blog from Nabonidus. We hope to post the latest information about Nabonidus here and get feedback from you as to how best to improve the application. Please subscribe to the RSS feed if you would like to keep informed of the latest news about Nabonidus.
• We have put quite a lot of effort into making the site "HTML standards compliant". This is just to ensure that Nabonidus works on all flavours of operating system and browser. There is still some work to do but we have gone a long way towards a standards compliant site.

As always please feel to comment.

All the best, Sam Wood.

Data Privacy and Ownership

We have had a few queries about the privacy and ownership of data in Nabonidus so we thought we would make it clear here that we claim absolutely no ownership of the data you store in Nabonidus. If at any time you want to remove it then you are totally welcome to. All your data is private to your excavation users only until you actually mark it as public - which you never need do.

Our hope is that in 10 years time when we have a lot of published excavation data in Nabonidus that it will become a very useful research tool for cross excavation analysis. A tool that archaeologists have never had at their disposal.

Future Functionality

Thanks to everyone who has replied to our emails and made comments and suggestions about Nabonidus. A lot of people asked about what we were planning for future versions of Nabonidus so we felt we would post something here so everyone can get a feeling for where Nabonidus is going.

• Desktop/mobile version for use onsite. We aim to build a version of Nabonidus that you can install on your laptop or mobile device and use to input data whilst on an excavation. When an internet connection becomes available you will be given the opportunity to upload your data to the website.
• Integration with GIS applications
• Data Import and Export functionality. We realise a lot of users currently have data in other databases and formats and would like to import that data to their Nabonidus excavation. We also realise that a lot of archaeologists have tools and applications they use to analyse their data and it would be useful for them if they could export data out of Nabonidus and into their other applications. We are working on a solution to both these scenarios.
• Survey component. A independent sheet on the same level as the context and wall context pages for the recording of survey data. The data, as with all Nabonidus data will be adaptable to individual excavation needs.
• More reporting. Distribution of pottery classes across whole areas and sites. Cross Excavation analysis. .PDF output for reporting.
• Public facing page for excavations to publish information about their dig to the general publc.
• Document repository. Allow excavations to store all their documents online along with their excavation data.
• EVE - Estimated Vessel Equivalent.
• Perhaps some sort of integration with Google maps/Windows live

Please feel free to comment and if you have ideas for things we haven't covered here then please tell us.

Nabonidus Beta Release

Nabonidus is a free tool for the archaeological community - it is a website for the storage, management, manipulation and publication of excavation data. It is currently used by the Pompeii Archaeological Research Project: Porta Stabia run by the University of Michigan and Stanford University and has the capacity to be used by 1000’s of excavations. All data is secure and private, accessible and malleable and the system can be adapted to any excavation’s needs. Nabonidus saves enormous amounts of work and time for archaeologists both onsite and during post excavation research. Even if you are currently using a database for your excavation, all information can be easily imported from this into the Nabonidus system.

We have started this blog to keep everyone involved and interested in Nabonidus informed of new releases, bug fixes and to allow users to post suggestions about what they would like to see in future versions of the product so please feel free to add comments whereever you like.

All the best,
Sam Wood.
Nabonidus Administrator.