Arcadia works not only to document endangered cultural heritage, but also to protect threatened ecosystems and to promote open access to information. Arcadia currently supports cultural heritage documentation projects in more than 40 countries, each of which is deploying the Arches platform as its data management system.
At present, Arcadia’s projects can be found in the Middle East and North Africa, Central Asia, Mongolia, China, Nepal, Afghanistan, the Indus River Basin, the Maldives, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Brunei, Vietnam, Mali, Senegal, Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Botswana, and Zimbabwe.
Mike Heyworth, consultant to Cultural Programmes at Arcadia, noted, “Our international projects to document endangered cultural heritage encompass many languages, including several non-Latin scripts, such as Arabic, Hindi, Mandarin, and Russian. This enhancement to Arches greatly improves accessibility to a huge volume of new data and consequently new knowledge about the many diverse cultures and communities that Arcadia supports.”
Arcadia’s projects were early adopters of the Arches platform, beginning in 2015. Robert Bewley, who was director of the Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa project (EAMENA) at the time, noted: “By choosing the open-source software platform Arches as our database of record, the EAMENA project has saved years of software development work.”
Mohmoud Abdelrazek, database developer for one of Arcadia’s newer projects, Mapping Africa’s Endangered Archaeological Sites (MAEASaM), observed that, “Recording data about archaeological sites is a complex task [and] Arches fits our purpose…Arches provides an easy to use and clean interface to the user whilst maintaining complex data and functions on the backend.”
Arches utilizes international standards for cultural heritage information and information technologies. It is highly customizable and can be configured for use by public agencies and policymakers, researchers and students, non-governmental organizations, property owners, developers, visitors, and the public at large. The Arches platform is freely available under the AGPL3 open-source license for cultural heritage organizations worldwide to implement however they wish, but with the stipulation that any enhancements are made available to the community.
In a separate initiative known as Arches for Science, the GCI is expanding the Arches platform to manage conservation science data. This will enable scientists to secure, retrieve, visualize, compare, and share their data, as well as to manage the process of laboratory research tasks.
Another new expansion to the platform recently initiated and also funded by the GCI—one which goes hand-in-hand with the new internationalization effort—is the creation of a stand-alone Reference Data Manager (RDM). The RDM is a vocabulary tool that manages the meanings and relationships of words and concepts, allowing users to find records by searching for any known synonym, including any local terms or foreign words. Along with the internationalization work, it will vastly facilitate searching, improve accuracy, and aid in data preservation.