PalaeOpen workshop „Developing data sharing in Archaeozoology“ at SNSB

From June 22 to 23, 2026, members of the PalaeOpen initiative met in Munich at the SNSB. Archaeozoologists and palaeoecologists from Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Sweden and the Czech Republic engaged in an in-depth discussion on the topic “Developing Data Sharing in Archaeozoology.”

PalaeOpen is a COST Action (= European Cooperation in Science and Technology)—an EU-funded initiative aimed at connecting researchers who generate and analyze paleoecological data as part of their projects. This includes metadata from a wide variety of academic disciplines. Much of this paleoecological data is currently scattered across various repositories and databases and is in many cases not publicly accessible. So far, there are only a few platforms that bring this multidisciplinary data together. Only by linking repositories and databases specific to each discipline can the data be used for paleoecological meta-analyses.

At the workshop “Developing Data Sharing in Archaeozoology” in Munich—organised by SPM, various platforms for data exchange (e.g., Neotoma, SEAD, or BIAD) as well as for recording raw data (e.g., OssoBook) were presented and discussed—especially with regard to their use by a multidisciplinary research community. The OssoBook software developed at the SNSB and LMU Munich for storing and analyzing osteological data, is particularly well-suited for such further development.