ArcheoFOSS 2022
Towards Bradypus v.5: Interconnecting the archaeological research

Panel: I/O: ethics, policies and technologies for programmatic and open access to archaeological online data sets

Presentation is available for download at: DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.7107339

Bradypus ia a web-based database managing system specifically addressing the specific needs of archaeological and more in general Cultural Heritage connectd projects. It was conceived in the archaeological laboratories of the University of Bologna in 2006 and released as an open-source, MIT-licensed. The latest major version, the forth, was released with AGPL-3 license and is maintained by LAD: Laboratorio di Archeologia Digitale alla Sapienza (Digital Archaeology Laboratory of Sapienza), in Rome.

Since 2006, about thirty Italian and internatinal projects are using the official cloud version provided as a service, thanks to the collaboration with the GARR Consortium.

This paper is about the project of the total rewrite of the software, under the light of the huge and very rich experience gained in this long years by the collaboration of quite different research project, ranging from stratigraphical excavations, to regional-scale initiative, to archive-oriented research. While Bradypus has followed for longtime a monolithic architecture, adding new functionality and features on request, a completely new paradigm is being adopted for the new major version, shaped around the central concept of interoperability.

For this reason, big efforts are being spent on defining and documenting the main Application Programming Interface (API), the unique point of entry to the new ecosystem. It being implemented using an open standard (OpenAPI) and an open design and collaborative paradigm. The key concepts at the basis of the implementation of the project are the ease of use for end users (basically archaeologists), without limiting functionality — a cornerstone of the project since its first versions — and the possibility of extending connectivity towards other platforms, by providing tools that thirds can use to extend functionality. Bradypus v.5 aims at providing a full set of tools, enabling archaeologists not very comfortable with new technologies to manage and share their data online on one hand, and, on the other, by providing well documented APIs on which to build new functionalities for digital archaeologist or computer scientists willing to contribute and reuse the platform in other areas.

License

This text is released under Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 Imternational license.