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The ALPAGE project is conducted by a large team of archaeologists, historians, geomatics and computer scientists coordinated by Hélène Noizet, totalling about twenty researchers from several laboratories, including the LAMOP, ArScAn, LIENS, L3i as well as IGN-COGIT, IRHT, and the Centre de topographie historique de Paris (National Archives). Together they built a historical GIS, in order to examine the spatial dimension of historical events for the city of Paris. The project began in September 2006, lasted 44 months, and it is now hosted by the TGE Humanum (http://alpage.huma-num.fr/fr/). Through a digital webmapping platform accessible via the Internet, information co-produced by the researchers can be superimposed on present-day spatial data (blocks, parcels, roads, addresses). After presenting the general framework of the project and the application of webmapping tools, the authors illustrate the results coming from the analysis of a database which collects a series of tax records dating back to the period of Philippe le Bel, conducted together with the IRHT-CNRS, and its integration within the ALPAGE GIS platform.

Since 2003 when the Archaeological Unit City of Lyon (SAVL) was appointed by the French Ministry of Culture as a preventive archaeological operator, the increase inactivity revealed the need for a standardized in field recording tool. In the meantime, the state archaeological services required the different operators to adopt an extreme degree of homogeneity in the final excavation reports, in order to improve the long term management plan of the archaeological artifacts. This double evolution drove the SAVL to adopt an operating system development from the field to the final report process built on the ‘ALyAS’ GIS (Archéologie Lyonnaise et Analyse Spatiale). This system, enhanced as an additional tool for the French institutional GIS ‘Patriarche’, proceeds, with the overall results, from the archaeological fact scale to the topographic mapping feature. To the original database core (archaeological data, referenced documents and ancient map recordings) an extension module focusing on in field recording is added. The ongoing purpose of these tools is to connect the field recording results to GIS final processing. This approach links the immediate targets of preventive archaeology (reports) to the archaeological data management involved in a long lasting territorially applied GIS system. In the near future, some extensions should also respond to the institutional request, and each time become more refined, particularly when compiling archaeological artifacts recording the final archaeological reports.

In cooperation with the French Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs, the GIS Center of the Supreme Council of Antiquities of Egypt has undertaken the creation of an archaeological map of the West Bank of Thebes in order to supply the Egyptian authorities with a tool for the management and the development of this rich archaeological area. The relevant documentation for the mapping process, because of its abundance and disparity, requires the establishment of a unified documentation system using jointly GIS and databases. Besides the production of thematic maps, this tool opens new horizons, both in terms of processing and analysis and in terms of sharing and publication of data relevant to the knowledge of the cultural heritage of Thebes.

General principles of recording data in archaeology, developed and consolidated during the past thirty years have spawned a multiplicity of conceptual models and robust software solutions. Inrap, as the main actor at the national level, must foster the harmonization of different approaches to the recording of data in order to improve methods of collecting and sharing data. The paper shows the different solutions and main tools for data capture being applied by the excavation team managers of the Institute, considering the particularities of these tools such as origin, method, type of field, and scientific questioning. Moreover, the adjustments to which these tools are being subjected in order to fit different situations are presented. The focus is on an ongoing project to establish progressive convergence among the possible approaches, including the promotion of the development of a conceptual platform shared with the Ministry of Culture, which would allow a 'branding' of various databases. The use of a standard like the CIDOC-CRM, the international standard of reference for the exchange of information on cultural heritage, could serve as a reference.

The design and progressive implementation of an Archaeological Information System (AIS) at Inrap aims to meet the needs for improving archaeological reasoning as well as regulatory requirements. The term of AIS means here a coherent and organized set of resources (people, data, methods, processes, hardware, software, etc.) to acquire, organize, store, manage, analyze, and publish relevant archaeological information from various forms and sources. The overall objective is to enable Inrap to get consistent and harmonized archaeological information of known quality and managed according to interoperability. This project utilizes several studies and real situation experiments among which those produced for GIS in collaboration with CNRS and University F. Rabelais of Tours (UMR 6173 CITERES).

The purpose of the project led at the present time by the sub-direction of archaeology (Ministère de la Culture) is to organize the data transmission under IT format from one actor to another in the archaeological process of artifact management and documentation. This would mean that the diverse actors involved - regional services of the archaeology, department of the underwater and submarine archaeological researches, operators, administrators of preservation and studies centers, excavation warehouses, or museums agents responsible for archaeological collections - would not be obliged to collect this information again on their own computer systems, during the relay passage between actors.