Following the sun - tracking the VENUS data lifecycle.

Jon Bateman
ADS Curatorial Officer

We've now completed the first year of our involvement with the EU funded VENUS Project (Virtual Exploration of Underwater Sites). Our work so far has mostly consisted of attempting to trace and reconstruct the data lifecycle for the project. The project explores the possibilities of creating immersive and non-immersive virtual reality environments to allow archaeologists to interrogate data from inaccessible deep-water sites and also for the public to experience the sites in VR environments. The data acquisition element of this project is focusing on developing techniques to automate the generation of photogrammetric surveys using remotely operated underwater vehicles (ROVs) and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). So far I've made four journeys on my voyage to unravel the lifecycle of the project data:

Marseilles, France
weather: sunny and cold
weather at home: wet and cold

My introduction to the project was a gathering of partners in Marseilles to catch up on the various strands of work. The partners represent a diverse section of the archaeological and academic community, alongside archaeologists are automation engineers, ontological specialists, virtual reality experts and leading commercial deep-sea technicians. The meeting included a visit to the headquarters of DRASSM who are responsible for all underwater archaeological material in both inland and off-shore contexts for all of France and its dependencies. We also went aboard one of COMEX's marine operations vessels to view their navigation, control and data systems.

Hull, England
weather: sunny
weather at home: sunny!

Coinciding with our two-week English summer, the next stepping stone took me to one of the endpoints in the data lifecycle as we paid a visit to Dr Paul Chapman of one of the VR partners in the project , SimVis, for a tour of the HIVE at the University of Hull. The HIVE has facilities for fully immersive visualisation of both virtual and augmented reality. Whilst VENUS will create some immersive VR environments through which archaeologists can interact with both site and data, there is also the challenge of creating portable, non-immersive environments for use by both archaeologists and non-archaeologists outside of a lab environment.

Ancona, Italy
weather: sunny and very hot
weather at home: very wet and cold

A convoluted flight path took me to Ancona on the Marche coast to visit some of the members of ISME (Integrated Systems for the Marine Environment) based at the university there. Giuseppe Conte, David Scaradozzi and their team are automation engineers working on the control of, and data collection from the, ROV. This work involves the critical point of data integration during acquisition, where positional and navigational data streams are integrated with a variety of image capture systems. Theyhave been developing schemas for embedding full image metadata (including all device variables and GGA standard positional data) within the EXIF data of the JPEG images, which can then be read by photogrammetry software to aid model production. The techniques and methods were still under development and we were dealing primarily with hypothetical ideals, which made for optimistic coffee-fuelled chat. Probably a bit over-optimistic...

Clockwise from top left: retrieving a DPGS buoy, manning the ROV control room, the Portuguese Navy survey vessel NTR Auriga, solving technical problems with the survey gear, unfouling the Auriga's anchor, planning the ROV/AUV survey tracks.

Sesimbra, Portugal
weather: hot and sunny
weather at home: wet and cold

A flight and a long drive through the cork forests took me to the site of the second of VENUS's three field projects. Based in a rambling, James Bond set of a hotel, the project was investigating a medieval wreck identified only by its cargo of tiles and some stone shot. It lay in nearly 60m of water about a mile out from this bustling fishing and holiday town. I thought I'd timed two days on site so it would coincide with the climax of data collection. I was wrong. A series of unforeseeable technical problems meant that on my arrival little meaningful data had been collected. Even when all seemed on track and I was on board the naval hydrographic survey vessel which was providing support for the mission, it was only to witness vain attempts to repair a broken ROV controller and some heavyweight winch work as the Portuguese sailors retrieved their stuck anchor. So the realities of complex data acquisition in difficult environments became all too clear. If this small delay could be considered an inconvenience, the upside was the opportunity for some long, detailed and fruitful discussions with the other project partners as we waited for the technical problems to be resolved... that and the sun, sea, sand and fresh seafood of course.

The next phase of the ADS's work on this project will be to draw all the partners together here in York in 2008 for a workshop on the lessons we've learnt from these field trips, let's hope the sun comes out.

VENUS: http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/project/venus/
ISME: http://www.isme.unige.it/
COMEX: http://www.comex.fr/
SimVis: http://www.dcs.hull.ac.uk/simvis/
HIVE: http://www.hive.hull.ac.uk/

The VENUS Project is funded by the European Union under the 6th Framework Programme. (By error this was shown as the 7th Framework in the printed version of this document.)