Nic Wiltshire represented OpenHeritage at the recent Paleocore Workshop in Nairobi from 21-23 September, 2015. The workshop was organized in conjunction with the Biodiversity Information Standards group (TDWG. http://www.tdwg.org/) and full funding for participants was provided by an NSF cyber-informatics grant for PaleoCore (http://www.paleocore.org).

There were over 20 participants from Tanzania, South Africa, Ethiopia, Benin, Kenya and the United States. Denné Reed ran an outstanding workshop, covering the key concepts behind open data standards before moving into hands on demonstrations of the various software tools used for Paleocore. There are many synergies with OpenHeritage as we are also making extensive use of QGIS and PostgreSQL, while the demos of R for statistical analyses and GISPro for offline App recording on Apple devices were very useful. This workshop underlined the importance of carrying out the mapping exercise of the fields used for SAHRIS, NAHRIS and future OpenHeritage system implementations. This will make it easier for researchers to connect their data sets to our systems. 

OpenHeritage is looking forward to future collaborations with Paleocore and we are sure this is just the beginning of a major shift in how we handle heritage data.