Technical Overview¶

Product Overview¶

The FAIMS Mobile Platform is an Android application and Ruby server built by intersect for the Federated Archaeological Information Management Systems (FAIMS) Project, funded by the National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources (NeCTAR) program.

FAIMS is used by Archaeologists, Humanists, and Scientists to collect Survey and GIS data in the field.

Problem Statement¶

The problem of¶

Archaeologists collecting field data on paper.

Affects¶

Archaeology team members.

The impact of which is¶

• Team members spend time in the evening digitising such data rather than using it.
• Transcription mistakes can be made.
• Digital data from devices such as Total Stations or GPSs is separate to the manually collected data.

A successful solution would¶

• Work for all Archaeologists, regardless of workflow or terminology.
• Allow research data to be captured in digital form in the field.
• Free up time for the Archaeologists to do more valuable work.

Components¶

Web Application¶

The web application serves as the central hub for data collection. A user would create a project on the web app and then android users would download the project onto their device and start collecting data in the field. The android application has the ability to synchronise the data collected in the field with the web app which in turn will be propagated to other android users. This is meant to keep all users up to date with their data in the field. The web application also allows administrators to cleanup the collected data usually at the end of day.

Android Application¶

The android application serves as the collector of data. Users can download a project from the web application and then start collecting data in the field.

Key Features

• Customisable UI

• Data Synchronisation

• File Synchronisation including videos, audios, photos and attachments

• GIS data collection

• GPS tracking