Governmental agencies and public institutions create on a regular basis thousands of analysis, statistics and reports regarding the wellbeing of a country. There is a vast amount of data available today and data is now being collected and stored at a rate never seen before. Much, if not most, of this data however is locked into specific applications or formats and difficult to access or to integrate into new uses.

CIMEC - Institute for Cultural Memory has been updating and maintaining the National Archaeological Record Database (RAN) for years. It was their wish to make public this database under Creative Commons license and allow users to explore the entire database in an interactive and engaging way.

The challenge here was to allow the entire set of 45 thousand records from RAN to be explored and easily understood by any user.

According to www.OData.org , the Open Data Protocol (OData) is a Web protocol for querying and updating data that provides a way to unlock your data and free it from silos that exist in applications today. OData does this by applying and building upon Web technologies such as HTTP, Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub) and JSON to provide access to information from a variety of applications, services, and stores. The protocol emerged from experiences implementing AtomPub clients and servers in a variety of products over the past several years. OData is being used to expose and access information from a variety of sources including, but not limited to, relational databases, file systems, content management systems and traditional Web sites.

We have used OData protocol for publishing and consuming RAN into Microsoft Windows Azure cloud platform. In this way, the dataset is available to all users of Vestigii independent of their location or the means they want to use to explore the dataset.

For the user interface we have created a Microsoft Silverlight 4 application that queries the Windows Azure data service for RAN data depending on the users’ input. The asynchronous request the application creates allow users to browse the data while computations and communication is on-going. All points of interest in the RAN database are geo located, a fact that allowed us to easily mark them on the latest Bing Maps control.