I am currently the director of the Swedish National Infrastructure for Archaeological Science, hosted at Umeå University.
From 2022 I have run the Archaeological Science node (Module 4) of the Swedish National Infrastructure for Digital Archaeology (http://swedigarch.se/).
I’ve been involved in database design and development since the early 1990’s (mainly MS Access) on a more or less amateur hacker basis. Since then I’ve progressed through various versions of Access, an excursion into FoxPro (which was great while it lasted) and comfortably landed in PostgreSQL. This has almost entirely been related to research data infrastructure, ranging from the MS Access based Bugs database products (currently BugsCEP) to the current work on the Strategic Environmental Archaeology Database (SEAD). SEAD is constantly being expanded to include more analysis methods, and is part of the Swedish National Infrastructure for Archaeological Data (SweDigArch), which will link numerous distributed data sources through the Swedish National Heritage Board’s open information system K-Samsök.
A database is generally only as good as the software created to interface with it, and so the above systems are shrouded in a host of applications. BugsCEP is an ageing VisualBasic 6 frontend to an MS Access 2000 database. SEAD is a more flexible platform, and has interfaces created, by more professional people than me.
I am also involved in the Neotoma and DataArc infrastructure projects.
More information to come on these, but see the project websites for more serious details.
I’ve been working at the Environmental Archaeology Lab at Umeå University, Sweden, since 2008, when I returned after a brief spell in the real world.
See the links below for more information on various infrastructure projects:
ARIADNEplus – The European Infrastructure for Archaeological Data (3rd party)
ESPADON – French Heritage Sciences infrastructure on the Dynamic Analysis of Ancient and Digital Objects (Strategic Orientation Committee)
HSS – Heritage Science Sverige (Steering committee)
Humlab – Humanities laboratory, Umeå (Chair of Scientific Advisory Board)
IPERION-HS – Integrating Platforms for the European Research Infrastructure ON Heritage Science (3rd party)
Neotoma – Neotoma Paleoecology Database and Community (Leadership group)
Old Wood in a New Light – Swedish national research data infrastructure for dendrochronology (Co-PI)
SBDI – Swedish Biodiversity Data Infrastructure (Partner)
URDAR – A research infrastructure for archaeological excavation data (Co-PI)