Portable Antiquities Scheme Work Flow
On 20 April, at a meeting of the Digital Coins Network at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King's College, London, Ian Leins gave a short, informal presentation on the WorkFlow used by the Portable Antiquities Scheme in the creation, editing and publication of their data.
As requested by Tom, workflow at the Scheme is outlined below:
- contributors: 110 people around country have various degrees of access that allow for content in the form of text and images to be added.
- Different user groups have different access levels - to enter data these are: Finds Liaison Officers, Finds Specialists, Admin, trusted sources.
- 10 individuals have the authority to "enrich and improve" these data. These individuals are specialists in their field of artefact study.
- finds specialists can edit all details of records. However, the workflow model directs the relevant data to the appropriate person (see workflow diagram - slightly out of date).
- There are 4 status levels - quarantine (records that need work, grid references not trusted etc - this is invisible to the public user), on review (record incomplete and is also invisible to the public user), on validation (the creator is happy with the record and has passed it on to this stage to be reviewed and edited if need be - this is visible to the public), published (edited if needed and now visible to the public with status of checked.)
- The records use a traffic light system to indicate the status - quarantine = black, review = red, validation = yellow, published = green.
- Records are subject to an audit trail, with all changes logged with comparisons between data and user changes indicated. We don't use versioning.
http://ourpasthistory.com/images/344.jpg
This model is quite robust, however a caveat does arise with substantial bottle necks. Our specialists are struggling under the volume of data created ( 130,000 records in 3 years.
