Safeguarding and exploiting Cultural Heritage induce the production of numerous and heterogeneous data. The management of these data is an essential task for the use and the diffusion of the information gathered on the field. Previously, the data handling was a hand-made task done thanks to efficient and experienced methods. Until the growth of computer science, other methods have been carried out for the digital preservation and treatment of Cultural Heritage information. The development of computerized data management systems to store and make use of archaeological datasets is then a significant task nowadays. Especially for sites that have been excavated and worked without computerized means, it is now necessary to put all the data produced onto computer. This allows preservation of the information digitally (in addition with the paper documents) and offers new exploitation possibilities, like the immediate connection of different kinds of data for analyses, or the digital documentation of the site for its improvement. Geographical Information Systems have proved their potentialities in this scope, but they are not always adapted to the management of features at the scale of a particular archaeological site. Therefore this paper aims to present the development of a Virtual Research Environment dedicated to the exploitation of intra-site Cultural Heritage data. The Information System produced is based on open-source software modules dedicated to the Internet, so users can avoid being software driven and can register and consult data from different computers. The system gives the opportunity to do exploratory analyses of the data, especially at spatial and temporal levels. The system is compliant to every kind of Cultural Heritage site and allows management of diverse types of data. Some experimentation has been done on sites managed by the Service of the National Sites and Monuments of Luxembourg.
Sea lamprey (Petromyzon marinus) is a unique jawless vertebrate among the most primitive of all living vertebrates. This migratory fish is endangered in much of its native area due to dams, overfishing, pollution, and habitat loss. An introduced predator, the European catfish (Silurus glanis), is now widespread in Western and Southern european freshwaters, adding a new threat for sea lamprey migrating into freshwater to spawn. Here, we use a new prototype predation tag coupled with RfiD telemetry on 49 individuals from one of the largest sea lamprey European populations (Southwestern france) to quantify the risk of predation for adult sea lampreys during its spawning migration in rivers with large populations of European catfish. We found that at least 80% of tagged sea lampreys (39 among 49) were preyed upon within one month, and that 50% of the released lampreys were rapidly consumed on average 8 days after tagging. This very high predation rate suggests that the European catfish represents a supplementary serious threat of extirpation for the native sea lamprey population we studied. this threat is likely to happen throughout most of the native lamprey distribution area, as the European catfish is becoming established almost everywhere the sea lamprey is.
Defined as ''an auxiliary science to History that studies the inscriptions on enduring substances'', epigraphy calls for very varied methods and disciplines. These all imply a preliminary operation: the survey and copying of the decoration engraved or painted on walls, columns, etc. This stage is essential in understanding and reconstituting ancient monuments, because cartouche friezes and ritual scenes give information on the date of a given temple or on the nature of the activities that took place in it. Nowadays, epigraphic surveys are still for the most part done in a traditional handmade fashion, while computer-aided epigraphic surveying is only used for simple tasks, such as drawing the contour of hieroglyphic signs on scanned photographs. The epigraphy of monuments includes scenes and texts. In both cases, the hieroglyphic signs engraved are made up of complex segments and curves, which must be accurately surveyed and recorded. Each hieroglyphic sign has not only a unique geometrical shape, but also a morphology proper to a given alphabet and a precise sense. What has been mostly done up to now deals essentially with the graphic form of signs and relegates their interpretation to an ulterior analysis. On the contrary, the method proposed here gathers data on the meaning and the geometrical shape of each sign. This will finally lead to statistical studies on the hieroglyphs' form, to automatic translations of the texts, and to the search for missing elements, based on geometrical as well as textual criteria. Our approach is not only adapted to the treatment of plane surfaces, but for the development of conical surfaces as well, so as to be able to survey the inscriptions of columns. The purpose of this paper is to present the computer tools that we have developed to draw and to record the shape and the meaning of the hieroglyphic inscriptions of walls and columns of temples, using the Egyptian temple of Amun-Ra in Karnak as our case study.
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