Online Cultural Heritage Research Environment

OCHRE

Importing Data

Many projects have data in digital form that they will wish to import automatically into OCHRE. A separate utility program will soon be available for this. Depending on the complexity of their existing data tables, projects may require advanced technical support—which is available for an additional fee—to assist with importing their data into OCHRE.

Getting Data In

The data to be imported must be in the form of two-dimensional tables consisting of rows and columns. Hierarchical relationships among items are often embedded in such tables, especially in archaeological tables, in which the first few columns normally contain locational information at different scales of measurement. This information is used to construct OCHRE hierarchies automatically. Likewise, the properties stored in table columns are used to create OCHRE item properties. The main challenge in importing existing data is to clean up inconsistencies in the data. This usually involves some manual editing within OCHRE after the automated import process is completed.

Getting Data Out

At any time, a project administrator can export his or her project’s data from the OCHRE database to local files in order to make a backup copy of the data. Data can be exported as XML text files or as data tables in the Microsoft Excel file format. The central OCHRE database is automatically backed up on a regular basis, so creating a local copy of project data is not strictly necessary; but it is advisable to make such copies as an extra precaution.

[Last revised on February 27, 2006.]

University of

Chicago