Preserving ancient culture with modern methods

From What The Wiki?!

One of the things that define mankind is our history. For tens of thousands of years, humans have created, and the knowledge about this heritage helps us understand who we really are. Scientists in many fields rely on historical records for their work, and for many of us, learning about our past is a very interesting hobby, maybe even a calling to some. Unfortunately, shabby implementations, non-standard interfaces and proprietary software often make it hard or even impossible to get the information you were actually looking for.

Robert Casties, a researcher of the Max Planck institute for the history of science, showed some examples of well-implemented historic databases, and talked about some of the bad ones - made unusable by bad code or idiotic setups (like locking the data inside proprietary software on a single machine made out of completely locked proprietary hardware) and urged the audience to work on accessible, usable, standard-compliant tools that can be used to preserve the vast cultural wealth we created over the millenia.

Related Pages:

• Hacking Mona Lisa - the abstract
• Robert Casties - the speaker
• Track:Hacking Mona Lisa - the video and other footage
• Project Gutenberg - Literature in the public domain - Article on lecture Literature wants to be free!