In making a standard of our database or survey we must ask ourselves some questions; some of these concern the whole database, others single fields. Everything must be done in order to define a general schema easy to use but complete, conducive to communication and flexible enough to adapt itself to each European country needs, in case we actually manage to extend the cooperation to the survey outside Italy as we would like to. We must first examine those questions concerning the whole database: we are going first to deal with problems related to various choices we must make and then, in most of cases, we’ll propose some possible solutions.
To decide what we are going to put in a database, we must first consider what is the database’s object, what its aim, its receivers and so what kind of data we are going to add in the description-representation of the object.
In this case, even the object of the database, for reasons we already discussed in the preface, must be defined better than we did in the first edition of the survey. In the first edition we dealt with pagan temples reused in or as christian churches; it’s true that Roman and Greek monumental temples leave on the ground traces easier to recognize, but today archaeological discoveries allow us to identify prechristian sacred places that are not properly temples, but should be added in the survey to complete information. These places are obviously more difficult to recognize, but sometimes we can do it even though a church has been built on them. As you can see in present edition of the survey, we considered not only temples which were totally or partially reused as or in christian churches, but also temples whose sites have been covered by a church. A correct title for the new database should underline this as in "Representation Standard for a survey of prechristian sacred sites and objects reused in or as christian churches". Defining the object and therefore the title of the standard is the first question we must discuss.
What is the survey purpose? The survey wants to give information about prechristian sacred sites and temples that today are no more easily identifiable: the temples’ valley in Agrigento, the temples in Paestum or archaeological excavations that brought up to light sites that were clearly sacred and allowed us to visit them, are all clearly known as sacred places. Pagans, researchers or lovers of ancient civilizations, that are the receivers of this database, can visit them or read about them, but how many of them know that the churches dedicated to Saint Stephen in Bononia, Verona, Rome and Beneventum have been built on Isis’ temples? So the record must include all data needed to identify a sacred place, what remains of it and the church that has been built on it. The schema must be simple but complete of all needed data. The current schema also has a place for photos, not included in the first edition, but certainly interesting to add in, and requiring a modest effort of cooperation. Another question to discuss are data we must include in; later we’ll consider the various fields of current schema and possible extensions we could make.
As we told before, every field must be identified by a tag in order to exchange records in ISO format; the tag must be a three-digit number we can choose at will. In the current edition of the database we divided data into blocks or sectors (following as example UNIMARC, another standard for bibliographic data exchange) of homogeneous data, marked with a different digit in the first place of the tag: every tag beginning with number 2 is related to the location of the sacred site (200 is the commune, 201 the province, 202 the region and 203 the country). In this way, tags are easier to remember and we preserve the possibility to widen the schema by adding new fields in a tidy manner, in their proper blocks. So the block 1-- includes data related to dedicatee deities (if known); the block 2-- includes data about site location; the block 3-- is for data related to the site’s reuse (parts that have been reused, how they have been reused, century of reuse); the block 4-- is used for data about dating of original temple (see also the paragraph about block 4--); the block 5-- is for data about the church reusing the site; the block 6-- is for notes, the block 7-- for photos. These blocks are an important matter of discussion because they make future expansions (or different levels of description) of the survey possible without need of rewriting everything.
Until the survey is made only in Italy, the language to be used for it is not a relevant matter, but while translating it in English for WCER congress in 2005 we had some doubt about what we had to translate and how. Anyway, if we want the database to be used also abroad, we must choose a common language, at least for those fields which allow this. The problem of language will become more determining in case the database should open to other countries’ contribute. We can’t unite two databases with different languages, or else the search in them won’t be effective, if we have to search for the same part of the temple using two different words. But in the database there are also proper nouns: deities’ names, names of places, names of saints. Should we translated them or not? As a general rule, proper nouns shouldn’t be translated but it won’t help searching in the database if we are forced to search for temple dedicated to the goddess Artemis first looking with the word "Artemis" and the with the word "Artemide" (in Italian). Therefore the problem of the language will be considered dealing with single fields; there will be an official language for all the database but some fields could make an exception, especially those with proper nouns, which could follow their own rules for language. But in every standard like ours, there are references from unaccepted voices to accepted ones: in this case we could draw up concordance tables for words from a language to words of the chosen language. Later, we’ll make other examples about this point.
Once we choose the language, there is the problem of the words’ choice: to make the database fully effective, the same thing must be always called with the same name, to help searching. Chosen words form the "controlled language" (thesaurus), that means the "official" words we are going to use.
As we said before, a real official standard should not deal with its practical application, because we should choose those program which can satisfy the standard’s requirements and not adapting the standard to a particular application. Though, our standard is an operative standard, dealing also with the problem related to data exchange and having its origin in the agreement among people who take part to the survey. In the preface, we said that the current edition of the standard have been created with a software allowing data exchange with ISO 2709 format. This format is advantageous because it’s a text format, readable by different computers, whose size is determined only by the number of characters in it. The software we are using (but which could be changed sometime in the future) and that at the present time looks suitable, is ISIS, a software for database creation freely downloadable from UNESCO website, using different languages. It’s quite easy to use, used for matters concerning cultural heritage and related to other softwares that allow you to change your ISIS database in a database on CD-ROM or web based. In this way, every person taking part to the project could play the database on his own computer creating a file following the standard, then exchange files with others, because ISIS allows databases integration. So databases created by various participants can join into a single central database, changeable into a web based or CD based database.
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