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ECAI Iraq: An Iraqi Cultural Atlas in a Distributed Resource Environment

Jeanette Zerneke
UC Berkeley

Everybody has heard the stories: the Bagdad and Mosul Museums were looted, the secret vaults were flooded, the looters are taking bulldozers to the archaeological sites. What can we as academicians, computer scientists, concerned citizens do? That was the call at the Vienna Conference in April co-hosted by ECAI and Computing in Archaeology Association.

ECAI is creating a virtual Cultural Atlas to piece together what we know of Iraqi Cultural Heritage. The collections of Iraqi artifacts as well as the experts on various eras, empires, and sites are distributed throughout the world. What has been salvaged of Iraq's past is what has been distributed throughout the world.

In order to put these pieces back together we have employed a time and space framework to connect internet resources and begin to develop the Cultural Atlas. This first version of the Iraq Cultural Atlas has a prototype spatio-temporal framework. It includes a timeline of Mesopotamian and Iraqi history, over 70 major sites, and 50 historic periods. Over 700 Internet resources have been identified. Over 120 institutions are hosting these web resources.

The development of the prototype Atlas has helped to identify the challenges and advantages of creating integrated systems. The time and space framework can be developed, built and hosted by a single institution. The images, texts, multimedia resources will always be distributed. The challenge is how can we build the institutions, technology, and procedures needed to reintegrate these components of our human heritage? The advantage of the virtual system is to show how exciting it can be to succeed.