25
Field Example 1
Example 2
AnalysisMethodID 1
2 TechTermEng Geochemical
prospection Palaeoentomology
MethodNameEng Soil Chemical Prospection
Fossil Insect Analysis MethodDescriptionEng
The use of soil chemical methods for the identification of spatial variation
with an aim towards identifying possible sites of archaeological
interest prior to excavation. The use of subfossil insect remains
as proxies for past environmental and climatic conditions and changes.
Units Various Abundance
UnitsAbbreviation TechTermSwe Geokemiskaprospektering
Paleoentomologi MethodNameSwe Prospektering
med markkemi
Insektsanalys MethodDescriptionSwe
Användning av variationer i markkemiska spår för att identifiera
möjliga områder av arkeologisk interesse innan en utgrävning.
Användning av subfossila insektsrester som proxikällor för förra
miljö och klimat förehållander och förändringar.
InternContactID 5 6
Table 5.2. Table structure and data examples for enabling bilingual interface and searching. The example shows the structure of the table tblAnalysisMethods, which holds details of the scientific methods used in
environmental archaeology analyses.
5.1.4 Data security
As SEAD will inevitably contain unpublished data from ongoing contracts and research, a security system must be put in place to prevent unauthorised access to this data. The
proposed structure allows data to be assigned access levels at the Sites level by users with administrative or developer access rights. The facility of SQL Server to enforce
security levels for virtually any object table, form, query etc. will enable this policy, and others, to be rigorously enforced.
5.1.5 Data structure
Tables and relationships for the MAL project database see Sections 4.4.3 6 were prototyped using MS Access 2000. This structure was then further normalised and
expanded into the full SEAD database using MS Visual Studio’s SQL-Server database project interface. The resulting design has over 120 interrelated tables fulfilling the
large part of SEAD’s anticipated data requirements, and representing all areas of the lab’s activities see Appendix I. The large number of tables and complex linked
structure is a feature of a highly normalised relational database, which improves data storage and retrieval efficiency.
The data areas defined in section 4 and outlined above are shown in more detail in this section. Refer to Figure 5.3 for an explanation of the database structure diagrams, and
Appendix I to see how the areas are related. Database tables are linked by one to many relationships where the data held in the
primary key field
is unique for every record in that table the ‘one’ side of the relationship. The field with the same name on the ‘many’ side of the relationship may
contain several records where this value is identical, and is referred to as the foreign key
. For the example shown in Figure 5.3: in tblTaxaInsectGenera the beetle Genus ‘Carabus’ has the unique GenusID=3, and in tblTaxaMasterInsects there are several
records where GenusID=3 which represent the species within the Genus.
26 Specific attributes, such as field types, sizes and restrictions will be not be presented in
this document, and should be considered in the Database Construction phase see section 3.
Figure 5.3. Explanation of database structure diagrams.
5.1.5.1 Project data
The project data area is essentially the same as that prototyped in MALdb see sections 4.4.4 6.2. The structure in SEAD has been refined to enable better management of
project level metadata, and enforce the data hierarchy as defined in section 5.1.2.
