Video
Advancing Archeology in the Midwest Region through GIS
Transcript
Speaker 1: If you need technical assistance during your call press star zero.
Speaker 2: After the tone please state your name, followed by the pound sign.
Karen M.: Welcome to the NPS Archeology Program Speaker Series for fall 2013 and winter 2014. My name is Karen Mudar and I'm an archeologist in the Washington office. This is the twenty-first in a series of webinars that the office has sponsored over the past eighteen months. This fall and winter we've been looking at geophysical technologies for archeological site location and recordation. If you missed any of the previous webinars you can access them through the archeology program website at the URL on your computer screen. I'm happy to report that we have posted all of the webinars up to and including the one presented two weeks ago.
Our last webinar was presented by Lori Collins and Travis Doering, who are co-directors of the Alliance for Integrated Spatial Technologies at the University of South Florida. They were early adopters of laser scanning with heritage projects using terrestrial laser scanning starting in 1999. In their presentation they focused on NPS collaborative projects to demonstrate heritage and archeological documentation research. They emphasized effective workflows and approaches for heritage management. I also noticed that National Geographic had a nice article on TLS recently as well and the efforts that are being made to document heritage resources using these technologies. If you want an explanation of the methodology for laymen you might take a look at that article.
On February 6th we will present our last webinar in this series, entitled, "Business in Great Waters: A Review and Assessment of Marine Archeological Remote Sensing Techniques and Technologies;" hosted by the charming and talented duo of NOAA's James P. Delgado and NPS' David L. Conlin, an underwater archeology team that should be compared to Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers. This talk will take a global excursion in marine remote sensing to look at how underwater sites are located, interpreted, and documented utilizing remote sensing technology. Case studies, including deep water work on the Titanic will be used.
The presenters tell us that this talk is not just for nerds, but for any archeologist, manager, solicitor or resource professional who may come into contact with marine remote sensing technologies and techniques. I'm looking forward to this presentation with great interest and I know that you are too. Dave Conlin gave an excellent ArcheoThursday webinar on laws about submerged cultural resources about a year ago and two days later eclipsed his presentation with a life-threatening accident during a dive. We hope that this is not going to be habit forming.
Before I introduce today's speakers I want to remind people that the presentation will be recorded, so set your phone to mute. Also if you are having difficulty viewing the images for the presentation you might check your computer's operating system. Windows 7 and Internet Explorer appear to give the best results. I don't know if anybody else is having trouble getting on to the website, but I am today. so I'm going to be persistent and you should be too. Today NPS archeologists Anne Vawser and Amanda Davey are going to talk about advancing archeology in the Midwest region through GIS, information management, modeling, and analysis.
The NPS Midwest Archeological Center or MWAC holds archeological site and survey data collected at nearly sixty parks in the Midwest region over five decades. The archeological information management team there maintains spatial, locational and attribute data for 5,000 recorded sites and 1500 projects in a Geospatial Information System or GIS. GIS has become an integral part of how archeology is conducted at the center. This presentation will discuss data management, current projects, including the creation of standardized digital archeological base maps for each park unit in the region, recent modeling and analysis projects, and future plans to offer WebGIS and mapping services.
Anne Vawser is the team leader of MWAC's Archeological Information Management Team and she's been working in archeological information management for the NPS since 1986. She's also been involved in development of the ASMIS database, which is our Archeological Sites Management Information System. She was involved in the NPS cultural resources data transfer standards for GIS, the development of those standards, so she's been very active in policy, as well as actually doing GIS work. Amanda Davey Renner is an archeologist with MWAC and she is the assistant team leader of the archeological information management team. Thank you, Anne and Amanda for giving us your time today.
Anne V.: Well we're really glad that everybody could join us and hopefully everybody's able to get in and isn't having technical difficulties. I think I'll just start out kind of with a little bit of an introduction and then let Amanda go into detail. I thought I'd, for those of you who aren't familiar with the Midwest Region of the National Park Service, give a little bit of information about that. The region is home to, I think we put in the abstract 59 parks, but I think we're up to 60now, so we've hit that nice, even, round number. We have, yeah, about 60 parks in ecosystems that range from the Great Plains to the Great Lakes to the Ozark Mountains, the heartland, the Mississippi River Valley. The region covers thirteen states and contains about four million acres of parkland.
The parks in the region are diverse, with large national parks, such as Voyageurs and Badlands. We also have many recreational parks, recreational parks like Cuyahoga, Missouri National Recreational River, multiple riverway and shoreline parks, such as Saint Croix National Scenic River, Apostle Islands National Lakeshore. The region is also home to several significant cultural parks, such as Knife River Indian Villages in North Dakota, Hopewell Culture Park in Ohio, and Effigy Mounds National Monument in northeast Iowa. These parks preserve prehistoric mound cultures and village sites. We also have, of course, many smaller historic parks, including four forts, two battlefield parks and eight presidential homes.
Primarily because the majority of the parks in the region are small, most do not have an archeologist on staff, they just simply don't have enough work in the park that would require to have a full-time person on staff or even with some of the larger parks they just they haven't been able to accommodate that in their organization plan. In fact currently only three parks in the Midwest region have a park archeologist, although another four parks have resource specialists who are qualified archeologists. For this reason, the Midwest Archeological Center has sort of traditionally maintained the archeological site information for all of the Midwest Region parks.
A little background on the Midwest Archeological Center. We are located in Lincoln, Nebraska, and we are an office of the National Park Service. However, the office grew out of the Missouri River Basin Survey that was the Smithsonian River Basin Survey that worked to conduct reservoir surveys from the '40s through the 1960s along the Missouri River Basin, where reservoirs were being constructed. When that work time was winding down, the center became an office of the National Park Service. Currently we have about fifteen permanent staff and eight term employees and of course multiple temporary and student employees who assist the parks in the region with their archeological needs.
We do also occasionally assist parks in other regions and also other agencies as well. In addition to our park archeology program that assists the parks with their archeology, we also have a collections program that manages approximately 2.5 million artifacts and archives related to primarily archeology in the Midwest region; although we do also hold some collections for the old Rocky Mountain Region, which I guess would be now the Rocky Mountain Cluster. It was formerly the Rocky Mountain Region. Then, finally, we serve the archeological information management needs of the parks in our region.
Some of the data management activities that we undertake here include maintaining the National Park Service's ASMIS database, the Archeological Sites Management Information System database, and we currently have approximately 5,000 records in that database for parks in the region. We also create and maintain archeological basemaps in GIS for the Midwest Region, for the 60 parks we currently have a base map for each of the 60 parks. Then, we also maintain both attribute and spatial information about archeological projects that have and are continuing to be conducted in the region.
We have about 1700 attribute records related to those projects. [inaudible 00:11:33] of being created all the time, as well as more site records being created all the time, so it's an ongoing management. In addition to data management we use the spatial analysis tools available to us, once you have all this information into GIS, to do some other very interesting things. We've been developing suitability models, predictive models, climate change and accessibility models, many more, which Amanda will describe to you here in a minute. We also assist with project planning, such as determining the slope and aspect or accessibility issues, helping archeologists plan their projects in the parks or helping parks with other planning issues.
Then, of course, we respond to a lot of requests for data from the parks. Most recently we've been getting a lot of requests from the parks for data for their foundation documents or redoing national register nominations, or just trail plans, just a variety of planning types of activities that the parks are involved in. With that brief introduction I'll turn it over to Amanda and she will demonstrate some of the maps and give you a little bit more information about all that great stuff we do.
Amanda R.: All right. Like Anne mentioned, we're currently responsible for maintaining the Archeological Sites Management Information System, or ASMIS, records. We also have an in-house project history database that has all the attribute information for our surveys that have been conducted by MWAC and also other outside contractors in our parks. We are responsible for maintaining, updating our Geographic Positioning System, GPS units, and providing those for archeologists here at the center to take out into the field, as well as the Geographic Information Systems or GIS.
I'm going to briefly talk about each of those different responsibilities shortly here. As Anne mentioned, ASMIS is basically the NPS database that has all the information, attribute information about the sites, and it's a service-wide database. We're mainly responsible here for just the Midwest region records. Whenever an archeologist goes out and records a new site or conducts a site condition assessment or anything like that we bring that information back here and update the ASMIS record and make sure that all information is updated in there.
We also enter in information about the survey, who conducted it, where it was conducted, why, things like that, the report title in our project history database so that we have a full record of sites and surveys that were done in the park unit. Here at the center we have both mapping and survey grade GPS units available to the archeologists to take out and the archeological information management team is responsible for making sure those are always updated and ready to go out. We often load data for the archeologists before they go out in the field so that they have things like current topos or sites or survey layers on the GPS unit to help them navigate when they're out in the field.
We also have an in-house data dictionary we've developed here and that helps with standardizing data collection so that standard things get entered into the database when people are out recording sites. That also allows us to easily integrate it with our GIS data back here at the center. I'm going to play a little video that kind of demonstrates our data dictionary. We'll see if it works. As you can see here there's standard feature classes setup for recording survey data, for recording sites, for different features and it hopefully makes things easier for people recording out in the field and saves time and also standardizes the data that's collected.
Additionally, this data dictionary is set up to mirror our geodatabase where we've stored all of our site and survey data in the GIS and I will show that here in a little bit. We also develop specialized data dictionaries that are more specific for different projects in case the information the archeologist wants to collect out in the field is different from what we have set up in this standard data dictionary. All right, hopefully everybody's back seeing the original slide. I'm done with the video, but we'll move on here.
For the GIS data we store everything in a file geodatabase and I have a screenshot of it up there on the right and you can see how it matches the setup of the data dictionary with features, sites and surveys. This allows us, when archeologists come back from the field, to instantly append this new data into our geodatabase and transfer the data and get it updated right away. In addition to that, we also have relationship classes set up so that we can link the site data to other relational databases, such as ASMIS, and you can see at the bottom, down here, we have several different tables from the ASMIS database that have been imported into our geodatabase and relationship classes are represented up here, which basically links these tables to those feature classes.
We'll demonstrate a little bit later on when we look at the base maps how that information is tied together and how we can see the ASMIS data in the GIS now, based on these relationship classes. We also have cartographic representations set up in the geodatabase, which are basically a standard symbology that's saved within the feature classes as well, so if we sent this geodatabase to a park or to somebody else that wanted the data and they brought it into a new blank map it would come in set up already symbolized. It just kind of is a nice way to be able to keep the symbology that you have set up in your map in the geodatabase when you transfer the data to other people.
Then, finally we also have our data in the culture resource data transfer standards, which is kind of a feature level metadata for each of the sites and surveys that allows us to record information about when the feature was created and different aspects of the individual feature itself and that information stays in the attribute table for each feature and allows that information to travel with the data when we give it to other people or other parks as well. Then finally all of this information that ASMIS and the PHD and the geodatabase all come together in base map for each park and these base maps are just ArcMap documents, but they have standard data layers and symbology set up.
They're linked to the ASMIS and the project history database and they also have the standardized NPS layout template, so it makes printing maps really quick and easy. I'm going to switch over and try to demo the base map for Knife River Indian Villages. All right, so hopefully everybody's seeing Knife River Indian Villages on their screen now. This is the standard screen that you see when you open up a base map here at MWAC and it's just the boundary with the sites displayed and nothing else, but as you zoom in closer there's more data layers that turn on and also labels. Each of the features have different labels setup to show up at different zoom levels so that they aren't carving out other data.
As you zoom in, more layers turn on and labels turn on and give you more information about what you're looking at. Then, to actually view the ASMIS and project history database information, all you need to do is click on the “identify” button and click on the feature you're interested in and the identify box on the side here shows us, at first, all the culture resource data transfer standards on the site. If we click here on the left, we can begin to look at our ASMIS data and we can see the ASMIS ID and the state number and the site name, discovery date, and you continue to expand to just view more information about that site that you're looking at in the GIS.
If we click on a survey polygon, information from the project history database will appear. Once again you just expand out to view the different fields that are available. Yeah, lots in that one. The dates the project was completed during, the project type, the crew members, the name of the report and so all this information is in here and it makes it really easy to access and takes a lot less time than looking through two different databases trying to get this information together. If you have a project and you know that it's going to take place in this one area you can go there in the GIS and find out what reports you need to look at, what sites are in that area, all in one spot, so it kind of makes it a one stop shop.
Then if I switch over to the template you can see how this is ready to go, all you have to do is add a title and a month and a year that the map was created and you have a map that's all ready to print out. We have different base maps, different years of imagery or the topo map, any kind of background data you might want to display behind that is available in the base map as well. It's all right here and it makes it a lot easier to access. I'm going to go back here and show some of the geophysics work that Steve De Vore in the office here conducted this past year at the Stanton Mound Group. We have that geo-referenced and added into the base map as well.
We also have LiDAR that was collected for Knife River Indian Villages in the base map available to overlay with the geophysics data and it just gives you a complete idea of all the information available for that site. Then I'll just show you something cool really quick here. This is the Big Hidatsa Village site. The LiDAR hillshade and EDM are visible and it might take a little bit to show up on your screen, but it's really amazing to see all of the depressions from the village site that are there that show up in the LiDAR.
I think that's, yeah, if there's any questions about the basemap we can always come back to it later, but I think those are kind of the main points to show you guys. I think I'll try switching back to the PowerPoint now. All right, well, hopefully, everybody's back to seeing the PowerPoint again, but this is just a plug for the ESRI map book, "Mapping the Nation," that features mainly federal GIS projects and we submitted our basemaps for the spring 2013 edition, so last year, and we're included as one of only two NPS projects in the map book, so we're pretty excited about that. This is some of the data from the Hopewell culture unit displayed here in the basemap.
I think we'll move on now from the basemaps to just talk about some of the modeling and analysis projects we've done in the last couple of years. I'm going to start out with two projects we recently completed for Buffalo National River and Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore that are site location predictive models. They, like it's showing here, the archeological site location models mainly look at environmental characteristics of site and non-site locations to predict where sites will be found in the future. Some of the typical variables are elevation, slope, aspect, vegetation type, distance to water, things like that.
Our first model we'll talk about, for Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, was conducted prior to an ongoing project at the park, it's a multi-year project. Its first year began in 2012 and as part of the research design a GIS model was included to help guide inventory. The Indiana Dunes has currently two-hundred archeological sites that are recorded in the park and those, let me find my notes here, those extend from the late paleoindian period, approximately 8,000 to 6,500 BC through late pre-contact and also historic sites. Many of the prehistoric sites typically occur on flat, dry benches near water. The majority of them are also found within the major dune systems at the park.
Here's an aerial view of Indiana Dunes with the two main units, the East and the West Unit where we focused our model on. As you can see, Indiana Dunes stretches nearly 15 miles of the southern Lake Michigan shoreline. We acquired data from a variety of sources, some of our data came from the park, a digital elevation model from different county and state sources we were able to derive aspect and slope from. We acquired soils data from the NRCS and hydrography data from the Environmental Protection Agency Hydrography Dataset. These were our main data sources for creating the model.
This is the predictive surface which was created for the East Unit. Areas that are red are high probability and green are low probability for locating archeological sites. Based on the model, site locations were found to be significantly associated with elevation, slope and soil type, but not distance to water. The model correctly predicted 74 percent of non-site locations and about 62 percent of site locations were predicted correctly. In 2012, based on this model, different areas were selected for inventory and during that field season they were able to discover seven new sites, five pre-contact and two historic sites.
It definitely, I think, helped guide inventory that year and we plan on improving the model based on results from the site fieldwork and improving it every year as we gather more data and try to make the model better and hopefully by including more data that's collected we'll be able to do that. Here's just the West Unit, which has more low probability areas than the East Unit. I kind of went through this quickly, but some more information, as Karen mentioned earlier, that model, as well as a few other different projects that we had going on here at the center, are featured in the "In Focus" section of this most Park Science edition that came out.
If there's anybody that's interested in more information on that that's a good place to go and look. The other project to talk about is Buffalo National River and this a little bit different than the Indiana Dunes model, because they're focusing on rockshelters and Buffalo National River has about 166 prehistorically occupied rockshelters within the park boundary. It's a large number for resource manager tasked with preserving and protecting these sites and the project that they had planned for the Lower Buffalo Wilderness, inventorying mainly the rockshelters in the area, they decided to create a predictive model for rockshelters to determine and guide inventory, kind of like Indiana Dunes.
Here's just a little locational map of Buffalo National River and the Lower Wilderness area in Arkansas. I thought I should give a little background on what we're talking about when we talk about rockshelters and they're mainly formed in three different ways: river erosion, which you see a lot at Buffalo National River karst, so the limestone bedrock geology is a major influence of where rockshelters develop, and also frost weathering. All these different processes are going on at Buffalo National River to create different types of rockshelters in the park boundary. These also are important things to consider when kind of trying to predict where you're going to find occupied rockshelters on the landscape.
Our main data sources for this model included, once again, the hydrography from the National Hydrography Dataset. Recent LiDAR that was collected for the park by the USGS, allowed us to have really high resolution digital elevation models and create aspect and slope layers from that. Once again our main variables in the analysis were elevation, slope, aspect and distance to water. All these were found to be significant variables influencing the location of occupied rockshelters at the park. You can see on the right side there is the predictive surface, the red areas are high probability, green are low probability, for the entire park.
On the left side the image is a close up of one of these areas showing a bend in the Buffalo River and a bluff top and the predictive surface is overlaid on a digital elevation model and ARCscene, which is allows you to view things in kind of a 3D view. The predictive surface is laid over top the elevation model and this allows you to see areas on that bluff face that were extra high probability areas, that bright red, allowing you to kind of visualize where you would want to look on that bluff face for occupied rockshelters. It looks like from that inventory they conducted following this modeling project they were able to locate a 109 new sites in the Lower Wilderness Area, 27 of those were rockshelters.
The final project we'll talk about is the analysis project with NPS Trails program that we did here in Nebraska, partnered with the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. We were focused on two sites out in western Nebraska, in Morrill County, Mud Springs Pony Express Telegraph Station and the Rush Creek Battle site. Our main purpose was to locate, document and map extant trail routes and Civil War area features that were associated with these two sites. We conducted a geophysical survey at the Mud Springs site and did a GIS LiDAR analysis of that area.
I'm going to talk about a few of the different types of analyses we did using GIS. The first is a line of sight analysis, which allows you to show areas that are visible and not visible from certain locations and so this is a line of sight analysis that we did from a rifle pit that was at the Mud Springs Station. I guess I should give some background on what occurred at Mud Springs. The Mud Springs was a telegraph and Pony Express station and in 1865, following the Sand Creek Massacre, there was a group Cheyenne, Arapaho and Lakota that began moving from Colorado through Nebraska through the Sandhills and up towards South Dakota.
There was a battle that took place at Mud Springs on February 4, 1865, and then the following two days there's another battle that took place at Rush Creek, the Native Americans versus the army at the time. At Mud Springs, during the battle, there was a rifle pit that was dug into the hill next to the station, so this line of sight analysis is showing us what the person who was in the rifle pit could see and whether or not they could see the buildings associated with the station and the surrounding landscape. There's a profile graph that you can create that shows the visible and nonvisible areas versus the topography.
We also conducted a least cost corridor analysis between the Mud Springs Station and the Rush Creek Battle, as well as Rush Creek Springs, which is at the head of Rush Creek, where they believe that the Native Americans had been camped out during the battle. Least cost corridor analysis is very similar to a least cost path analysis. It's based on mainly a cost surface, which is typically a slope layer and instead of creating a single path or a least cost path in between two locations, you use the cost surface layers to give you a range of values, where you can look at wider areas that have the least amount of cost to travel between two locations.
These are showing you the least cost path in between both those two locations or least cost corridor, excuse me, in between these two locations, trying to understand how people might have been moving on the landscape in between Mud Springs and the campsite and the battle that took place out at the head of Rush Creek. Then finally this image shows the hillshade, LiDAR hillshade for the Rush Creek site. This battle took place very close to where the Overland Trail would've been on the south side of the Platte River and you can see on this topo map, it might be kind of hard to see, but there's a dotted line here that indicated that approximate location of the Emigrant Trail, as it's called on the map.
This circle is where the battle area took place and that's mainly equivalent to what you're seeing on the LiDAR hillshade to the right. We digitized the Emigrant Trail off the topo map and overlaid that on the LiDAR and when we did that you can see extant trail ruts crossing the creek right where they're marked on that topo, so it turned out that that topo had pretty good representation of where the trail actually was located through that area, as proven by the extant trail ruts that you can see in this LiDAR hillshade.
For future plans, I mean, we're going to work on including more data in the archeological base maps, adding historical imagery, linking the photographs and reports, trying to add as much data as we can that'll be useful for archeologists planning for field projects and things like that. We're also planning on providing map services with site and survey data via the Federated Enterprise Mapping Program, or FEMP, servers to parks, and that's kind of a larger program that we're working with the Midwest Geospatial Support Center to be able to provide these services so that we can upload our data to the FEMP servers and then people in parks can have access to those without us having to send the data out on CDs or email it or anything like that.
It'll all be available to people from these servers, but still in a secure way on a NPS server that we have the ability to control access to. Then after that hopefully we'll be able to add those services to either the NPMap or WebGIS applications, so that people that don't have access to GIS or GIS savvy users might be able to have access to that data. Then one final plug, we're also doing the PGIS, a Park GIS webinar on specifically our base maps on February 13th, so in a couple of weeks here. If you want to hear anything more about the base maps you can tune into that. I think that's about all we have, unless Anne wants to add anything else?
Anne V.: Yeah and I think at that same webinar, I think, on the 13th, Deidre McCarthy is going talk a little bit more about the culture resource data transfer standards as well. We're happy to take any questions.
Amanda R.: Yeah.
Karen M.: Are there any questions for Anne or Amanda?
Chris: Hi, this is Chris at Crater Lake.
Anne V.: Hello.
Chris: It goes back to when you we're talking about the data dictionaries, I'm just wondering what made you decide to use the Pathfinder Office/TerraSync workflow versus the ArcPad GPS [Strat 00:45:20]/GPS Analyst workflow, since it looked like you were replicating the geodatabase anyway in the data dictionary.
Amanda R.: Yeah, I think it's more of an outcome of just historical happenstance.
Chris: Okay.
Amanda R.: That's kind of what we've always been using, TerraSync and Pathfinder Office, and then we developed the geodatabase model kind of after that and then went back and adjusted our data dictionary to match the geodatabase model.
Chris: Okay.
Amanda R.: I do like the ArcPad GPS Analyst route as well, but that's just not something we've done a lot here within the past.
Chris: Sure.
Anne V.: We found it a little bit more difficult with ArcPad, and maybe this is something that'll change in the future, we found it a little bit more difficult to sort of have that standardized data dictionary so that we had everybody sort of collecting data in the same way. It's just really simple with the Trimble, you bring up the data dictionary there to make sure you answer the questions, you pick the drop downs and it was just a little bit more complex, I think, with ArcPad for us to be able to kind of control that. We may move in that direction at some point, because I mean it makes more sense since you're working in ArcGIS.
Chris: Right, because I was just thinking like your field, the drop down tick list changes in the geodatabase it just seems like there's a little bit more overhead on the GIS end to make sure that those, the data dictionary and the geodatabase, are always in sync with the field names and the attribute values and things like that. I also understand that it is a lot easier, especially if you don't have GIS-savvy people who are out collecting the data TerraSync is definitely easier for in the field data collection.
Karen M.: This is Karen, can you talk a little bit about the Federated Enterprise Mapping Program, the FEMP servers? I haven't heard about these before.
Anne V.: We don't know quite all of the-
Amanda R.: Yeah.
Anne V.: It's complicated.
Karen M.: Oh, okay. Is it a CESU project?
Amanda R.: No.
Anne V.: No, it's really sort of, I think, an enterprise GIS effort to have data, have GIS data centralized on servers where people can access the information rather than sort of everybody kind of having their own datasets and on their own servers. The idea is that you can get, for example, for an entire region you can get all of the data, natural resources data, cultural resources data, administrative data, maintenance data, any kind of GIS data on these servers and then the specific group that has control over that information can kind of control what goes on there and make sure what's on there is up-to-date. Then people can simply access that data, it's served to them through their GIS from that server.
For example for us if we get a request from park, “Gee, we really need the most recent, up-to-date archeological basemap for Wind Cave, because we need to do X, Y, or Z.” If we just send them the geodatabase, as soon as we send it to them what they have is out of date, because the next day we may make a change to that geodatabase and add a site or change some other aspect to a polygon or that sort of thing. It would be much better for the park if they need the most recent data they would simply go to the web server that we would always be putting the most recent up-to-date data on that web server and then they can access it that way.
The other nice thing about that, from our perspective, is that we can control, theoretically, I'm worried on this aspect of it, but we can control who has access to it. We sort of have a small group of us that have access to a spot on that server, we can load information on there and then we can designate who can have access to it. I can provide the resource specialist at Wind Cave access to the data, but nobody else at Wind Cave would have access to the data and nobody else in the region would have access to it, so only the person who needs to have access gets it. Then that sort of helps prevent the data from going other places.
Karen M.: Okay.
Anne V.: I think that's the other thing about it, you put the data on CD or you stick in an email and you send it to somebody, well that's sensitive data and once it leaves your hands it's hard to control sort of where it goes.
Karen M.: Yeah. Is it region wide, then?
Anne V.: I'm not quite sure on, I think they're sort of like two different aspects of it. I think there's sort of a national level and then there's regional levels, because we've been working primarily through the Midwest Region, but I think it's sort of eventually all being combined at a national level.
Doug W.: Can folks hear me? This is Doug Wilder.
Anne V.: Oh, thanks Doug. I was going to say, "Maybe there's someone else on the call who would be able to explain that a little bit better."
Doug W.: Anne correctly summarized what the FEMP is and it is national. It's set up by the what we think of as the national GIS program in Denver. It's basically you can think of it as an array of servers and that they set up for parks and programs to use so that the parks and programs don't have to set up their own servers and manage the things that we use in GIS to serve out GIS data, which is ArcGIS server, SQL server, SDE. They manage all that. They figure out how best to optimize the server and all the background software and hardware infrastructure tweaking that have be done to make things run as smoothly as possible. They do that all for you so that you can focus on your data.
That's the idea behind FEMP and it is a national program and you buy into it, and we in the Midwest Region have been involved from the inception of FEMP. We've opened up the some of our virtual servers to MWAC, Anne and Amanda at MWAC, so that they can start experimenting with that and putting their data on it. The idea is you've federated your data out so that it's on these national servers, but it's accessible and manageable by the people who are the real stewards and closest to the data. For example the person at Wind Cave, the hypothetical person, I guess, at Wind Cave that Anne suggested.
Anne V.: Yeah, thanks. You explained it much better than I did. My sort of limited understanding of how it works, but it's really going to simplify, I think, how we can help get the data to the parks, because I mean we manage the data here and keep it updated, but it's not really our data; it's the data really belongs to the parks and they need it for planning and other archeologists in the office need it for planning and for compliance and that sort of thing. The more easily we can make that accessible the better.
Karen M.: Wow, how interesting. I haven't heard anything about this before. Is this linked to what's going at WASO, in terms of developing cloud data? Is that linked to that at all? ERMA, I guess that's what is. Does this link to ERMA or is this separate from ERMA?
Doug W.: It's separate from ERMA, but I think the ERMA folks and the FEMP folks work closely together. I mean but as an application it is a separate thing.
Karen M.: Okay.
Doug W.: You suggested cloud computing. That, too, is separate. There are a lot of things going on and it is hard to sort it all out and what's the best avenue to move forward for people who need to manage actual resources and-
Karen M.: Yeah.
Doug W.: FEMP is a solution that it's developed in the park service for parks and programs and there are other similar solutions out there and the DOI cloud computing contract, which is moving forward also, could be a similar avenue you could take. I know that Jerry Johnson, the DOI has a chief Geographic Information Officer, GIO, and he is working with the DOI cloud people to add a geospatial component to the cloud computing infrastructure that will be on offer to all of DOI, which will be something very similar to this FEMP that we're talking about.
Karen M.: Oh, okay. Oh, thanks for that. I didn't know anything about it. I have a question for the archeology people, how do you see ASMIS as fitting into this, if the GIS folks are sort of going a FEMP route, I guess, to providing data?
Anne V.: Well I know that the hope is the way that we are linking to the ASMIS data right now through the GIS is to do sort of a regular export of data out of the ASMIS database to a location on our server and then linking the data that way, because we cannot currently link directly into the ASMIS database behind the firewall, behind the park service firewall. I think Dave Gadsby and the ASMIS data standards team's folks and some of the rest of us involved in ASMIS are kind of in discussions right now and I think there are things in the works with PPC, the contractor for ASMIS, and the WASO/ASMIS coordination to try to get that setup that up so that we can have that more direct link.
If you go that route in the future than say, again, if someone was accessing the data off of the FEMP server when they're doing, for example, what Amanda was demonstrating with the basemap, if they were to click on a site at some point we hope that that would actually be linking directly to the ASMIS, the live ASMIS database on the WASO website, so that way you know that you've always got the most up-to-date, most current information.
Karen M.: Yeah.
Anne V.: That is something that is still in the works.
Karen M.: Yeah it seems like that would be very important to be able to maintain links between live databases. Thanks. Are there other questions or comments from people?
Sheldon: Yes, hello.
Karen M.: Hi.
Sheldon: Hi, this Sheldon at Mesa Verde. What issue of Park Science was those ... Is that a special issue?
Anne V.: I think I want to say it was the Winter issue.
Sheldon: Winter of 2013?
Anne V.: Yeah.
Sheldon: Okay.
Anne V.: It just came out. Yeah.
Karen M.: Really? I didn't think it was the winter one. Let me check.
Sheldon: Yeah, I was just on InsideNPS and entering search for Park Science and a lot of different things come up and I find that those magazines are hard to get ahold of. I wonder if-
Doug S.: This is Doug Scott. Hi, Amanda. Hi, Anne. I just accessed it on my computer, Anne, just by using Park Science, but I'm a civilian now so I can do things like that.
Sheldon: Oh okay. I'll track it down somehow I guess, but are they all online now or are they just do they do hard copies?
Anne V.: I think the last e-mail we had from Jeff Selleck, who's the editor, was actually that the digital version, the electronic version is up already on inside NPS and the paper copies will be mailed soon to those people who actually have a subscription to get paper copies of that.
Doug S.: The link that I have on it is www.nature.nps.gov\parkscience\
Sheldon: Okay. Great. Thank you.
Doug S.: Yes, it's fall 2013.
Sheldon: Okay.
Anne V.: It's fall of 2013, okay.
Doug S.: Volume 30, Number2.
Sheldon: Great.
Anne V.: Yeah, thank you.
Karen M.: How did that work, you guys? Did you guys approach Jeff Selleck or did he approach you?
Anne V.: I think actually it was Erin Dempsey in our office that approached Jeff or some else at Park Science regarding that. We sort of had a series of papers already that were to be presented in a session at the George Wright Society meeting that didn't happen and so we sort of thought, well, gee, man, it was another way that we can that information out there, so the Park Science was a, I think, a nice way to get that information available to the park community.
Karen M.: Park Science is becoming more and more important as our other cultural resources publications are falling by the wayside, they're-
Anne V.: It's nice to see Park Science diversified actually a little bit with more and cultural resources types of articles in there, because it's been primarily natural resources for much of the past.
Karen M.: Yeah, they've done a nice job of incorporating archeology and cultural resources in their tables of content.
Anne V.: Well we ended up going much longer than we thought we would. Of course we're always happy to answer phone calls and if anybody has any questions or wants to talk about anything-
Karen M.: Well, thank you so much, Amanda and Anne.
Anne V.: Call Amanda. Yeah, I know.
Karen M.: Amanda, do you have another comment?
Amanda R.: No.
Anne V.: No, I was just teasing. I was saying if you need something call her.
Karen M.: Oh. Well, thank you much, that was a very great, a very nice presentation. Can you do me a favor and stop the recording?
Anne V.: Yes.
Karen M.: I was never able to get onto the website, so you guys drove all of it.
Anne V.: Hopefully, it works out okay.
Karen M.: I hope so, too. Thank you very much for doing that. If it doesn't work, you know, you'll just have to give it again!
Description
Anne Vawser and Amanda Davey Renner, 1/23/2014, ArcheoThursday
Duration
55 minutes, 37 seconds
Credit
NPS
Date Created
01/23/2014
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