Resources, Opportunities and Limits of Data and Open Source Tools Used in Preventive Archaeology

Open resources are increasingly used in preventive archaeology, following a more general trend in society, with a useful and effective impact for this task. In fact, on the one hand, we are witnessing the definition of standards increasingly devoted to open source access by the direct decision of the Ministry of Culture, effective both at a central and peripheral level, in order to guarantee standardization and interoperability in data management. On the other hand, in the preliminary archaeological risk assessment phase, the use of contextual data—cartography, remote images, datasets, etc.—which increasingly populate the open source repositories of the web, is necessary, but not always obvious to recover. The use of open source resources in preventive archaeology must be improved, as sometimes they are employed at an insufficient definition. What are the opportunities ahead, but also the main limitations that have not yet been overcome?