3D Spatial Analysis:the road ahead

Archaeology, like several other disciplines studying the physical landscape, is inherently about three-dimensional data; that is, about physical objects and volumes and their associated properties. Yet our records of this 3D reality have traditionally perforce been reduced to two dimensions, restricting the subsequent analysis to 2D, or at most 2.5D, as well. GIS have been the tools typically used to manage and analyse these 2D/2.5D spatial data sets since the early 1990s. Within the last decade, technological developments in data capture (such as laser scanning and image based modelling) have begun to generate large quantities of 3D data, giving rise to ‘3D’ as the new buzzword. However, such data can be visually inspected but not spatially analysed in this form. We believe that what is lacking is a software infrastructure that can encompass both ‘traditional’ 2D and ‘new’ 3D archaeological data in the same 3D environment, and can allow for analysis in three dimensions. We propose here to construct such an infrastructure from pre-existing FOSS4G components, and to create a number of additional bespoke query and report functions in order to achieve the functionality required by archaeological researchers