From ‘data banks’ to AI : are databases redundant? | Ian Johnson | CAAA2025 скачать в хорошем качестве

From ‘data banks’ to AI : are databases redundant? | Ian Johnson | CAAA2025

From ‘data banks’ to AI : are databases redundant? Ian Johnson Our evolving software environment enables increasingly complex actions with simple commands, risking loss of our understanding of the taphonomy of our data. In the 1970s there was brief enthusiasm in archaeology for “data banks” which would “answer all our questions”, but reality of scale and standards soon set in; even today FAIR and LOD offer only the promise of distributed data integration, raising issues of semantics, ontologies, paradata and reproducibility. So is AI the next great step in the creation of a global ‘data bank’? Ask a question on anything and an AI will assemble an answer. However we have little idea where its knowledge came from, how the answer was generated or its ‘hallucinations’; we have no control, so we should have no confidence; we cannot entrust our data to AI’s black box. We need open-source formats, good para/metadata, stable public servers, and control over how our data are modelled and stored. In short, we need transparent data handling. The days of the database are not numbered! That said, AIs offer many advantages. They excel at coding, software revision, bug detection, documentation and smart help. They can detect patterns, suggest hypotheses, summarise and execute complex repetitive processing tasks. They will (soon) be able to build effective data models for a specific data system from a verbal description. This paper explores how we are using AI to enhance the Heurist database builder (HeuristNetwork.org) and near-term evolutionary perspectives, while stressing the use of AI as an invaluable assistant, not a substitute for well-structured databases and transparent analysis. Don’t trust AI with your data! Presented on October 3 2025 as part of CAA Australasia Digital Archaeology Conference. You can become a member of CAA Australasia here: https://au.caa-international.org/subs... Follow us on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/caa-australa... Follow us on Facebook:   / caa.australasia   Follow us on LinkedIn:   / 12708537   #Archaeology #CAAA2025 #CAAAustralasia #DigitalArchaeology