A communiqué from David Schloen (Oriental Institute, University of Chicago) announces a new web site dedicated to the XSTAR Project (XML System for Textual and Archaeological Research). XSTAR includes a database model, a corresponding XML markup language, and software. The goal of the XSTAR project "is to create a sophisticated Internet-based research environment for specialists in textual and archaeological studies. In particular, XSTAR is intended for archaeologists, philologists, historians, and historical geographers who work with ancient artifacts, documents, and geographical or environmental data. It will not only provide access to detailed, searchable data in each of these areas individually, but will also integrate these diverse lines of evidence as an aid to interdisciplinary research. XSTAR consists of both a database structure and related interface software that will make it possible to view and query archaeological, textual, and linguistic information in an integrated fashion via the Internet. The XSTAR database structure is expressed in terms of hierarchies of interlinked data elements using the Extensible Markup Language (XML); XSTAR's XML data format is based on and incorporates ArchaeoML (Archaeological Markup Language), an XML tagging scheme previously developed at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute."

From the web site description:

The XML element hierarchies used in XSTAR represent the following types of information and the complex interrelationships among them:

• Archaeological and geographical descriptions, consisting of observations about geographical regions (topography, climate, hydrology, vegetation), ancient landscapes (roads, canals, fields), settlement sites (architecture, stratigraphy, botanical and faunal remains), and artifacts (including the physical properties and contexts of inscribed artifacts). Archaeological and geographical descriptions include not just alphanumeric data but also visual resources such as photographs, video clips, drawings, maps, and 3-D models.
• Text and script descriptions, consisting of the epigraphic and linguistic characteristics of ancient texts and scripts, including sign-by-sign transliterations, normalized transcriptions, grammatical analyses, and modern-language translations.
• Language descriptions, presenting the phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon of each ancient language in the database.
• Secondary literature and bibliographic references, consisting of technical reports and interpretive discussions of primary data, organized by author and by modern conceptual categories. The thematic organization of secondary material provides a framework within which archaeological, geographical, textual, and linguistic descriptions can be located.