Welcome

Projects

System Design

Data Integration

Core Ontology

User Manual

Welcome to OCHRE

The “Online Cultural Heritage Research Environment” (OCHRE) is an Internet database system for cultural heritage information. It is intended for researchers engaged in artifactual and textual studies of various kinds. It is especially suitable (1) for organizing and publishing the results of archaeological excavations and surveys and (2) for preparing and disseminating philological text editions and dictionaries.

OCHRE is currently being tested and refined by several pilot projects. An online help system and detailed user manual are under development. When testing and documentation are completed, OCHRE will be made available to other researchers. For more information, please contact David Schloen at the University of Chicago.

Purpose and Scope

OCHRE encompasses the varied evidence of past human activity, written and unwritten, within a flexible yet coherent framework. It has a simple basic structure—a “core ontology”—within which it can integrate data of diverse origins. Archaeologists and philologists work with information that is (1) derived from multiple sources; (2) recorded in diverse formats, as photographs, drawings, maps, structured tables, and unstructured text; and (3) described using different taxonomies. OCHRE is designed to organize such information into a coherent, easily searchable corpus, not only within a given research project, but also across multiple projects.

OCHRE can support an unlimited number of research projects, enabling each project to control its information and share it with others while still preserving its own terminology. The system has been thoroughly tested by several archaeological and philological projects based at the University of Chicago, Harvard University, the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Southern California, the University of Toronto, Brigham Young University, and elsewhere.

Technical Requirements

OCHRE uses the Java Runtime Environment (version 6 or later), which comes preinstalled on most computers. If you do not have Java, or are not sure you have the latest version, click here to install Java, free of charge. Apple Macintosh users must have OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard” or higher, on which Java 6 comes preinstalled. OCHRE requires a high-speed Internet connection, at least 512 MB of main memory, and a screen resolution of at least 1024 × 768 pixels.

[Last revised on  May 8, 2011.]

Dr. David Schloen

Associate Professor

University of Chicago

1155 East 58th Street

Chicago, Illinois  60637

d-schloen@uchicago.edu

Contact:

Online Cultural Heritage Research Environment

Organize and integrate all kinds of cultural heritage data, within one research project or across many different projects.