 All right, so this is me as Hussein. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I'd like to start with my apologies for not being there in person. I am, as a matter of fact, on my way to Crete this very evening. I'm grateful to Dr. Bruce Kerr for serving as my temporary avatar. My name is Hussein. I'm an archeologist and a GM historian by trade. I worked on the field in Turkey and Greece for the last two decades in both surveys and excavations. I've used a large number of fieldwork methodologies in the last 20 years, from simple notebooks to entirely paperless digital field recording. And I myself helped design methodologies of some projects. However, not unlike many of my peers, until very recently, I had no idea whatsoever about the existence of CDoC CRM, hence the title of this talk. I've heard about CDoC CRM merely two years ago for the first time and started understanding what it really offers only after I invited Dr. Bruce Kerr to give a guest lecture on formal ontology and CDoC CRM in my digital archeology class last year. Actually, started understanding might be slightly misleading. Let's say utterly intrigued, perhaps. For an outsider, grasping the details of this entire endeavor is no small feat, but I was not going to be deterred. So I started with reading articles. They say it helps with understanding stuff. So I've read and I've read. I've even taken notes on paper like it's 1998. Sure enough, reading has helped, but I was not going to stop there. Thanks to the admirable transparency of CDoC CRM scholars, all the internal documents of their efforts are online. So I've looked at their presentations and read the minutes of their meetings, feeling like a spy. And I checked the history and evolution of several technical issues in detail reading online correspondence. Finally, after having watched a dozen or so videos, I thought I finally may have started scratching CDoC CRM's surface. In the following 15 minutes or so, I will share my observations, which will inevitably be coming from the perspective of an ignorant outsider. My apologies for that in advance. Let me start with the good stuff. CDoC CRM based projects are already great. Of course, museums and other memory institutions are great archeological tools. And the idea of their integrated data becoming a queryable for researchers is like a dream for archeologists. So many projects are successfully doing exactly that and it's already very impressive. So far, so good. What else is new you're asking? Let me then turn to a huge opportunity which is unfortunately missed. A large percentage of archeological dissertations or monographs are based on some type of archeological catalog. Nailed it at figurines from Romania, Roman Baths of Spain, Middle Bronze Age pottery of the one site that I worked on 15 years ago. These graduate students or researchers build their own personal databases on Microsoft Access, FileMaker Pro or even Excel. Some use more sophisticated network analysis software or graph databases. Almost always, these databases remain unpublished. As a result, we usually just get PDFs of these studies which we have to skim through and that's that. Us archeologists, we are in the profession that requires two terabyte external hard drives with thousands of monograph PDFs that we need to carry around wherever we go to use their catalogs for research and for copper-anda purposes when the need arises. Nothing's credible and it requires almost photographic memory. Where did I see this shape before? Perhaps it was in Ebenezer Klopp-Patrick's book. I remember this type of bare figuring from somewhere. Ah, it was Chuckleberry. Rondo's dissertation? Of course, it doesn't have to be that way. Imagine researchers designing their databases from the very start using the formal ontology of core CDocs herein, as so few of us do. Imagine the catalogs of thousands of PhDs or dissertations in monographs that are completed each year in different countries immediately becoming part of an integrated archeological big data structure which would be curable and online. This, I think, would be an even bigger achievement for a CDoc CRM than excavations or architectural studies using CRM, archeo, or CRMBA, which I'll turn shortly. Of course, there are already some studies which successfully use CRM for their catalog data. Dr. Dake's work on bronze-aged urnfield graves is a prime example of showing CRM's potential. However, there's a big problem here, and it's an obvious one. The majority of archeologists don't know anything about CDoc CRM. I made a little experiment. Out of more than 30 archeologists who currently work in Greece or Turkey and field as different as Neolithic pottery to Byzantine architecture, the number of those who've heard about CDoc CRM was one. And in that case, her understanding of it that was in some sort of museum catalog system. This is obviously an outreach problem, and the inevitable and the only solution is reaching out. The method should be simple enough. You're building databases for your studies. If you use CRM while creating your classes and relations, your data will have the potential of being part of a larger virtual research environment. Then we will have curable archeological big data in the future, and peace will come to earth. Creating an online written tutorial on how to adapt one catalog to CRM for Montology would help immensely. Creating YouTube videos would go a long way as well. Now let me turn to CRM RQ and CRM VA, the models that are created specifically for archeological studies. I will not delve into the specifics of the issues about classes and properties of these models. A general observation, however, seems obvious to me. Though certain studies may only focus on architecture, hence utilizing only CRM VA, rarely will there be an excavation that will not need architecture-related classes and properties, since any Mesolithic excavation needs architectural analysis. Therefore, it seems that inevitable necessity for CRM VA to be fully integrated in CRM RQ, even if it continues to exist as a separate entity for purely architectural studies. The same goes for, to a certain extent, for CRM GEO and CRM DIG as well. GIS is today an integral part of archeological methodology and GIS-based analyses must be integrated in CRM RQ as well. If the ultimate goal is to cover all aspects of an integrate of an excavation. Moreover, digital recordings role is becoming more and more emphasized every year. Today, like many other excavations, in my project at Pilos, we use photogrammetry-based orthopotos for all of our architectural illustrations. 3D modeling is a routine procedure for both trenches and objects in most modern projects. Moreover, in recent years, several projects have been using photogrammetrical recording and analysis for all stratographical units, like Keros or Kajmachi in Turkey. I believe all of these modern aspects of an excavation should be accounted for directly in CRM RQ using classes and properties of CRM DIG. Let me now come to the most fundamental question. Why wouldn't archeologists want to use CRM RQ? That might require a brief look at the recording strategies that archeologists use today. Some projects still use simple notebooks with no digital database to speak of in the style of the 1960s. Some use standardized forms, but don't always digitize them. Some other projects enter the data into relational databases, which is of course the most fun thing to do at an excavation. And yet others record everything on tablets in the field in real time using specialized or generic software. Whatever the system, a project director decides on using, however, that is by definition perfect or at least sufficient for that project director. Their database or recording methods are those that they are most comfortable with and know well. So then why wouldn't an excavation director who wants his or her database or methodology to be compatible with CRM, a CRM-based model? Of course, the only answer is inescapable because he or she would like their data to be eventually integrated into a new general research environment accessible by all scholars. And herein lies the problem. Archeology is still in its infancy when it comes to data sharing. Principles of open science are mostly fairy tales for our discipline. I've never heard of an entire archeological excavation database being accessible to outside researchers. On the contrary, often archeologists jealously protect their data until final publication. Even after final publication, their raw excavation data is almost never published. Consequently, though I believe a large number of individual researchers with cataloged archeological material be easily convinced to use CRM-based models for large excavations and for their data, I think the situation is very different. First, the data would become... Sorry, first the data would concern a large number of researchers, at least some of whom would not like their material to be shared. Okay, now I'm understanding. You can convince individual researchers, but for large excavations, the situation is different. First, data would concern a large number of researchers, at least some of whom would not like their research material to be shared. Second, a project director level... Second, on a project director level, that would open the doors to close scrutiny regarding their excavation methodologies and almost nobody would volunteer for that. And even if, say, 10 projects adopted a CDOC-CRM-based databases, that would be nothing by definition a CRM's main reason of existence is the creation of integrated accessible big data not to inspire a handful of excavation projects. So the only solution is just like, it is the case for the world's other pressing problems like global warming, international collaboration regulations. Ministries of the cultures of the world or Europe must be convinced that not only final reports and copies of all data should be given to public authorities, but also that excavation methodologies should be transparent and databases must follow international standards like CRM and should be accessible by all, at least after the final publication of the projects. There are two problems here, of course, very rarely, one, very rarely do projects ever reach the final publication level and two, which lobbying firm should ICOM hire for this purpose? But that's another topic for another time. Thank you.