A.R.C.A. Project. Un prototipo software per l'archiviazione, la ricerca e la comunicazione del dato archeologico.

ARCA Project (acronym of Archiving, Research, and Communication in Archaeology) is a multidisciplinary Ph.D research project. The aim is to create a software package for the online publication of archaeological research. Before the development of the application, we conducted a series of bibliographic studies on the openness of online publications and Cultural Heritage data, as well as the current state-of-the-art of “cultural web”. In the preliminary phase and in the final phases of development, two user studies had been made. During the first year an anonymous questionnaire was created and disseminated, with the aim of collecting opinions about functional feedback and user needs. One hundred people have been invited to take part in this evaluation process. Usability tests, instead, were performed at the end of the application development, and were aimed at detecting any potential difficulties and identifying any gaps or needed changes. The correct functioning of the software has been tested by inserting data from an archaeological excavation conducted by the University of Padua: Ca’ Tron, a multidisciplinary project, already closed and not yet published. The end result is a product that is intuitive for most users, aimed to ease the publication of media related to archaeological sites and the sharing of this very specific knowledge at different levels with experts or with a wider audience