The Survey of Italian Pagan Temples reused in or as christian churches first edition was completed in April 2005 and its English version was finished in June, being distributed to people attending WCER congress in Antwerp. Like any other "beta" version, it has been a useful tool for knowledge and it’s now available on the web, but today it needs an updating. Surely from the point of view of the data in this survey but also in order to make it more "scientific", to extend it to the whole European area (this was the idea from which we started, but latter we restrict our survey to Italian region only).So we need to reconsider the whole survey to elaborate a standard which could allow the extension and use of this database in a more rigorous way, also keeping count of its possible future development: we partially did this in the first version of our database, making room for photos, still not present.
In these articles we’ll give a look to those problems coming forth from standardization of base schema down below:
(letter R after field means that the field is repeatable more than once in the same record).
Since not every person wanting to take part to the discussion about the new standard is used to database and standards, even though many points will be debated later, maybe it’s better to anticipate something and make some premises.
The word standard comes from French word meaning "flag". In few words, it is a set of rules established with an agreement, about a matter which requires some kind of "uniformity". In computer matter, standard are very common: HTML, the language by which a webpage is written, is a standard that makes possible this pages to be read by every browser. It doesn’t matter if you have Explorer, Mozilla, Firefox or others: if that page has been written with the HTML standard, every text included between the "tag" (tag means label; it’s an instruction given to your browser, the rules of the standard are based on use and decoding of these instructions) and the tag will be always put in italic letters by your browser. Generally a standard is born to favour compatibility and communication under different points of view: we may desire compatibility between different products following the same standard (for example screws and nuts: if they are made by different factories, they might not be compatible one with another) or between different interests (for example standards about the quality of paper are a compromise between paper productors’ profits and conservation interests of librarian). Internet itself wouldn’t exist without a communication standard which allows computers to communicate; grammar rules are also a standard.
The standard we are going to develop by formalizing our survey is quite like other existing standard regarding cultural heritage. Let’s consider a library’s catalogue: the catalogue must be compiled according to precise rules of representation of objects owned by the library, so to help users in their search. I’ll explain better: every card in the catalogue represents a book existing in the library and reports all fundamental data to localize the book in the library. These data must be written in an unique way, or else the user’s search will be unsuccessful. In few words, two books about cats must be listed under the same headword: if one is listed under "cats" and the other under "felines" the user won’t find every book answering to its search; two books by the same author can’t be listed one under its title, and one under the name of its author. Data in cards must follow always the same order. Otherwise, the reader couldn’t find what he was looking for and it will be difficult for libraries to mutually exchange their catalogue cards.
A unique and uniform way to present the data by which we represent objects in catalogues is fundamental to help search and data exchange. In our survey too real objects (temples) are represented through a description, and this description, according to what we said before, must be presented always in the same manner. Works as wide as the survey, both in its Italian version and in hoped-for European version, require cooperation and data exchange, which is possible only if people taking part to the project are working following the same model.
A database is an informative system in which data are organized in a certain manner; some kind of data container, in which data are ordered in order to recover the information we may need. To understand better, let’s consider the library’s catalogue we were talking about: it is composed by descriptive cards of books owned by the library, ordered so that to help search as much as possible. Our survey is just the same: is composed by descriptive cards of temples reused by christian churches, and the software we use orders and classifies them to make them searchable. In these cards we put those data we think are representatives and allow us to identify univocally a particular temple; it’s the standard that clearly states what are these data. Data are divided into "fields": every field contains a certain kind of data: the field "region" contains the indication of the region where the temple is and the content of this field may vary and contain the data "Umbria" "Latium" and so on. What we are interested in here, is not to understand how databases work, but how our database works.
In this case, the way we are building our database is conditioned by the software we chose; if we want to be rigorous, a standard shouldn’t deal with this, but only with principles and description rules. The chosen software, about which we’ll discuss later and which could however be changed in future, is based on an international standard of data exchange, the standard ISO 2709 for bibliographic data exchange. According to this standard, data exchanges are done in text format, a format readable by all computers and this makes easier to cooperate for all those who want to take part to this "survey". Every descriptive card (or record, as we are going to say from now on to use its proper name) presented in ISO format is made up of a string of characters: as we said before, data are divided into fields and in this case every field is identified by a three-digit number. These are the numbers you can see before every listing in the survey’s current schema you can see right above, so this is their meaning. We create this schema for our purpose, so we can choose these numbers at will, but every field in each record must always be identified with the same number, called "tag", label. We are not going to deal with other components of ISO standard; we just add that using same labels for same fields in different files of the database allows those files complement each other, so that we don’t have to make it by ourselves, typing record after record.
In the current schema of the survey you can see the different fields in which data about temples are divided and their conventional tag.
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