A Virtual Research Environment for Archaeological Data Management, Visualization and Documentation

Developing data management systems to store and make use of the heterogeneous archaeological datasets is very significant nowadays. This allows to preserve the information and offers new management possibilities, like the immediate connection of different kinds of data for analyses, or the digital documentation of the site for its improvement. In this scope, this paper aims to present a Virtual Research Environment for archaeological sites. It is based on open source software modules dedicated to the Internet, to avoid users to be software driven and to permit them to work from different computers. Our VRE has diverse objectives: digital archiving of archaeological datasets, data inquiry through different interfaces notably clickable maps and 3D models, attractive visualization and communication of the information. The tool proposed is compliant to every kind of archaeological site. Some experimentation has been done on sites managed by the Service of the National Sites and Monuments of Luxembourg.