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Dendrochronologia 30 (2012) 209211

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Dendrochronologia

j o u r n a l h o m e p a g e : w w w . e l s e v i e r . d e / d e n d r o

Technical note

TRiDaBASE: A stand-alone database for storage, analysis and exchange of

dendrochronological metadata

Esther Jansma a,b,c,, Rowin J. van Lanen c, Kit Sturgeon d, Steve Mohlke d, Peter W. Brewer e

a Cultural Heritage Agency (Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed), P.O. Box 1600, 3800 BP Amersfoort, The Netherlandsb Faculty of Geosciences, Utrecht University, P.O. Box 80.115, 3508 TC Utrecht, The Netherlandsc Netherlands Centre for Dendrochronology RING, P.O. Box 1600, 3800 BP Amersfoort, The Netherlandsd The Epison Group, 505 Hector Street, Ithaca, NY 14850, USAe The Malcolm and Carolyn Wiener Laboratory for Aegean and Near Eastern Dendrochronology, B-48 Goldwin Smith Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA

a r t i c l e i n f o

Article history:

Received 18 February 2011

Accepted 4 September 2011

Keywords:

Dendrochronology

Metadata

TRiDaS

controlled vocabularies

data exchange

a b s t r a c t

Dendrochronological data formats in general offer limited space for recording associated metadata. Such

information is often recorded separately from the actual time series, and often only on paper. TRiDaBASE

hasbeen developed to improve metadata administration. It is a relational Microsoft Accessdatabasethat

allows users to register digital metadata according to TRiDaS, to generate TRiDaS XML for uploading to

TRiDaS-based analytical systems and repositories, and to ingest TRiDaS XML created elsewhere for local

querying and analyses.

2012 Istituto Italiano di Dendrocronologia. Published by Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.

Introduction

Dendrochronological research of wood from the cultural her-

itage traditionally was directed at establishing its absolute age and

origin, and was focused on single locations, objects and structures.

But nowadays the research focus is shifting towards larger-scale

studies, in order to answer questions about the former (cultural)

landscape, climate, economy and the wood-processing industry

(e.g., Bntgen et al., 2011). This shift is possible because during the

last decades the size of the data collections managed at tree-ring

laboratorieshas drastically increased.To facilitate the new research

directions, we need to combine or digitally link these collections.

This is complicated because the manner in which dendrochrono-

logical metadata is recorded differs widely between laboratories.

In addition many laboratories only keep paper administrations of

their measurement series descriptive and interpretative metadata

(Fig. 1).

Against this background the current challenge is to develop

and facilitate international standards for digital data and metadata

registration, in this manner maximizing the digital exchangeabil-

ity and potential digital linking of dendrochronological (meta)data

Corresponding author at: Cultural Heritage Agency (Rijksdienst voor het Cul-

tureel Erfgoed), P.O. Box 1600, 3800 BP Amersfoort, The Netherlands.

Tel.: +31 6 25 00 00 55.

E-mail address: e.jansma@cultureelerfgoed.nl(E. Jansma).

collections. To this end we recently developed the Tree-Ring DataStandard TRiDaS (Jansma et al., 2010). The primary resource forthe

sharing of data is currently the International Tree Ring Databank

(ITRDB, Grissino-Mayer and Fritts, 1997). Although this is a great

resource for thesharing of data,it stores very limited metadata and

requires improvement to meet the needs of the community (Briffa

and Cook, 2008).

To take full advantage of the benefits offered by TRiDaS, exist-

ing dendrochronology tools (such as the ITRDB) clearly need

to be updated. However, a logical first step is to produce a

tool to enable researchers to collate the disparate sources of

information describing their own data. We therefore present a

new standalone database to fulfill this requirement. The TRiDaS-

enabled database described here allows researchers to integrate

research records including references to external files, to gen-

erate TRiDaS XML for uploading to TRiDaS-enabled analytical

systems and repositories, and to ingest TRiDaS XML created else-

where for local querying and analyses. TRiDaBASE is available

from the Digital Collaboration Platform for Dendrochronology (see

http://www.uu.nl/vkc/dendrochronology) and the TRiDaS website

(http://tridas.org/software).

Requirements of the TRiDaS database

With respect to dendrochronological metadata the new

database should fulfil the following requirements:

1125-7865/$ see front matter 2012 Istituto Italiano di Dendrocronologia. Published by Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.

doi:10.1016/j.dendro.2011.09.002

http://localhost/var/www/apps/conversion/tmp/scratch_10/dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.dendro.2011.09.002http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/11257865http://www.elsevier.com/locate/dendromailto:e.jansma@cultureelerfgoed.nlhttp://www.uu.nl/vkc/dendrochronologyhttp://tridas.org/softwarehttp://localhost/var/www/apps/conversion/tmp/scratch_10/dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.dendro.2011.09.002http://localhost/var/www/apps/conversion/tmp/scratch_10/dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.dendro.2011.09.002http://tridas.org/softwarehttp://www.uu.nl/vkc/dendrochronologymailto:e.jansma@cultureelerfgoed.nlhttp://www.elsevier.com/locate/dendrohttp://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/11257865http://localhost/var/www/apps/conversion/tmp/scratch_10/dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.dendro.2011.09.002

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210 E. Jansma et al. / Dendrochronologia 30 (2012) 209211

Fig. 1. Paper archive containing research metadata at the Netherlands Centre for

Dendrochronology RING. Photo RING 2008.

1. It should operate on stand-alone PCs utilizing an operating sys-tem that is commonly used and widely available in the whole of

Europe, in this manner allowing as many researchers as possible

to use the database when and wherever they want.

2. It should be designed for the long term and in such a manner

that changes to the database structure do not affect the content

of the database.

3. It should be structured according to the structural levels of TRi-

DaS, allowing scientists to store detailed descriptions of their

research projects and results as well as references to associated

files (e.g., measurement series, chronologies, photos and video).

4. It should safeguard content that is essential for the long-term

identification of specific content, such as project and sample

identifiers.

5. It should allow the manual entry of content, validate manuallyentered content against the requirements of TRiDaS and warn

users if content is not valid.

6. It shouldimport TRiDaS XMLproduced by TRiDaS-enabled facil-

ities and export user-defined selections into valid TRiDaS XML

which can be uploaded to such facilities.

7. For metadata fields where TRiDaS requires the use of controlled

vocabularies, it should force the use of these vocabularies; in

addition it should offer users the opportunity to import and

export locally developed controlled vocabularies.

8. It should enable users to query the content for metadata analy-

ses.

TRiDaBASE architecture

Operating system and software

TRiDaBASE is developed in Microsoft Access, because this

functionality is commonly accepted and easily available to most

Windows users.

Creating advanced database functionality using Access is chal-

lenging due to the specifics of the software. TRiDaBASE was

developed in the USA for first use in Europe and we encoun-

tered several problems arising from regional differences between

time/date notation. Access uses the locale of the Windows oper-

ating system that it is running on to determine how to store time

and date values. Date and time values entered on computers in dif-

ferent countries are therefore not directly comparable. Visual Basic

for Applications code was required to force Access to consistently

store dates and times according to the ISO standard required by

TRiDaS.

Another challenge is the fact that Access offers limited options

for form layout and only allows the use of bitmaps. This poses lim-

itations to the design of the user interface. We had to use minimal

form layout and illustrations in TRiDaBASE in order to optimize its

performance.

Structure of the database

TRiDaBASE consists of two separate parts. The data file TRi-

DaS Data.mdb contains the data, controlled vocabularies and rules

for enforcing relationships between data entities. The application,

TRiDaBASE.mdb, contains the user interface forms, programming

code and rules for converting the data to and from TRiDaS XML.

Because of this dual structure, theapplicationcan be updated while

the data section of the system remains untouched.

The data model

The content of TRiDaBASE is organized according to the

eight TRiDaS information levels: Project, Object, Element, Sample,Radius, MeasurementSeries, DerivedSeries and Values. Using our

growing experience with the data model, we developed TRiDaS

from version 1.1 (Jansma et al., 2010) to version 1.2.2. TRiDaBASE

is based on this latest version. The technical details of TRiDaS

1.0 through 1.2.2 are available online (see the TRiDaS website at

http://www.tridas.org).

Safety measures

TRiDaBASE is designed to help safeguard the users dataset. It

is a fully normalized database and uses automatically generated

(non-human readable) unique identifiers, in this manner insuring

relational integrity.1 The database does not allow multiple occur-

rencesof unique information. TRiDaBASE follows the requirementsof TRiDaS, in this manner insuring compatibility with TRiDaS-

compliant applications and software. The system detects actions

of users that drastically change either the content (e.g., by delet-

ing projects) or the structure (e.g., by changing the TRiDaS-based

relationships between fields). It then warns the user and asks for

confirmation of the action.

Manual data entry

TRiDaBASE uses navigation screens in which content can be

filled in manually (Fig. 2). Research projects are filled in hierar-

chically,starting at the toplevel (project information) andworking

down towards the lowestmetadata level,which contains metadata

belonging to the values level of TRiDaS. Once the user leaves a spe-

cific level, the content of this level is saved automatically. At this

point the system validates new content against the requirements

of TRiDaS. In case of invalid content the systemgives a warning and

will refuse to close the level in which the user has been working.

This means that content at odds with the TRiDaS data model will

not be saved.

Import and export functionality

TRiDaBASE has extensive functionality for ingesting and export-

ing TRiDaS XML project files. To import data, users specify a single

1

Human readable identifiers can also be used (e.g. local laboratory identifiers).

http://www.tridas.org/http://www.tridas.org/

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E. Jansma et al. / Dendrochronologia 30 (2012) 209211 211

Fig.2. Screendumpof TRiDaBASE;the leftpartshowsthe navigationpanel,the right

shows the form belonging to the project level of TRiDaBASE.

TRiDaS XML project file, and the content is then automatically

placed in the relevant domains of the database. In combina-

tion with the TRiCYCLE universal dendro data conversion tool

(Brewer et al., 2011), this functionality assists users to import andstandardize existing metadata available in many dendro data for-

mats. With data export the user defines the project that should be

exported and the path and filename of the produced XML. TRiD-

aBASE then automatically converts the project content into valid

TRiDaS XML. TRiDaBASE does not restrict import and export to

dendrochronological content. It ingests and exports all relevant

information, including project-relatedor even complete controlled

vocabularies (if this is specified by the user).

Controlled vocabularies

If data sets are to be linked and made searchable across lan-

guageboundaries, we need to startusing standardized terminology

for certain types of metadata. This is why TRiDaS prefers terms

from (multi-lingual) controlled vocabularies and fixed enumera-

tion terms. Controlled vocabulary schemes are multi-lingual sets

of predefined terms in accepted thesauri. Enumeration terms are

named values that (usually through identifiers) behave as con-

stants in language.TRiDaBASEenforcesthe use of TRiDaS controlled

vocabularies and enumeration.

TRiDaBASE also facilitates the use of non-TRiDaS vocabularies

such as terminology developed in individual laboratories. These

vocabularies can be placed in the vocabularies part of the system,

after which users can make changes and add new terms. Because

these vocabularies are not part of the TRiDaS data model they are

not validated or enforced by TRiDaBASE. They can, however, be

converted to TRiDaS XML, which enables researchers to exchange

them.

Creating queries

TRiDaBASE allows users to createqueries through the Microsoft

Access query wizard, in design view, and using Structured Query

Language (SQL).

Discussion

TRiDaBASE has been developed using Microsoft Access because

this functionality is easily available and commonly known to

Windows users. However, this feature also limits TRiDaBASE to

Windows based computers, Microsoft Office functionality, and

users with Microsoft Office licenses. In order for TRiDaBASE to

reach its full potential, future versions of this application shouldbeplatform independent, license free, and easily accessible through

the internet. Also, in its present form TRiDaBASE does not contain

queries that allow for local analysis of its content. However, the

database structure is open source and all users can add function-

ality locally. We expect that users may want to develop queries

for producing, among others, overviews of wood species, object

types and dates (and combinations thereof), and for automated

project-based research reports. The Digital Collaboration Platform

for Dendrochronology (http://www.uu.nl/vkc/dendrochronology),

through which TRiDaBASE is distributed, is available as a platform

for query exchange.

Conclusion

TRiDaBASE is a publicly available metadata-registration appli-

cation designed especially for tree-ring research. It is a Microsoft

Access database for digital metadata registration and for the

exchange of metadata and controlled vocabularies using XML.

TRiDaBASE meets all requirements of the TRiDaS data model and

is flexible enough to work with non-TRiDaS controlled vocabular-

ies. It operates on stand-alone PCs and by means of strict safety

measures protects its content. The structure of TRiDaBASE allows

content to be queried. The structure of TRiDaBASE supports future

adaptations to new versions of the TRiDaS data model.

Acknowledgements

The development of TRiDaBASEwas fundedby The Netherlands

Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), section Humanities,as part of the medium investment project Digital Collaboratory

for Cultural Dendrochronology (DCCD). TRiDaBASE was developed

by the Epison Group (Ithaca, New York), who also supported the

project financially.

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