ABSTRACT
This paper presents three key problems addressed by the Federated Archaeological Information Management Systems (FAIMS) project and presented during a Round Table session at the 2013 CAA. FAIMS is a major Australian digital infrastructure project established in 2012 to develop open source eResearch tools to improve archaeological data management. We first review existing Android GIS applications and discuss their performance and suitability for archaeological fieldwork in remote locations, before presenting the lessons of this review for FAIMS mobile application development. We then discuss the variety of Australian archaeological practice, suggesting how semantically compatible datasets may be produced from diverse sources at the time of data creation. Finally, we introduce the data structure underlying our mobile application, which accommodates a wide range of practices and data models while promoting syntactic and semantic dataset compatibility.
