Webservices

This dissertation project did not focus on using ARK but more on creating a web service which would work for all ARK projects. As a part of this an ARK project was setup using an old dataset from Henriette Roued Olsen’s Bachelor Dissertation about connections between Southern Scandinavia and the Sintana de Mures / Chernjachov Culture in Eastern Europe in AD 270-410.

This dataset was called Sintana for short and the ARK project setup consisted of only two modules: the Sintana module which represented the finds points of facetted glass across Europe and the Bibliography module which contained references to the facetted glass in different books and articles.

Based on this simple ARK setup Henriette created a web service which ended up searching both the Sintana and the Portus projects and extracting the information as XML.

The final part of the dissertation focused on combining different datasets with the ARK projects through web services and XML. For this the Swedish SMR FMIS (Fornminnessok) was used. The Swedes already have a working example of a web service up and runnning and the dissertation showed how a Heritage Portal could be setup cross-searching the FMIS and the Sintana dataset outputting the result as XML or HTML.

The dissertation furthermore created a WFS (Web Feature Service) to handle the spatial data in the Sintana ARK project. This proved to be very simple since the ARK project is already setup with Mapserver. This exercise demonstrated how the spatial data in ARK can be reused in other online applications.