Late 2012 I presented my 'Mummies on Rails' paper. There is some background behind how I ended up doing this. It was ascertained form the fate of many a previous system that trying to provide a complete solution for all archaeologists is destined to fail. The something for everyone ending up providing nothing for anyone syndrome in effect. Hence a focused study on one particular area was selected. This was to be ancient Egyptian mummies, due to the local availability of expertise and resources relating to this field, namely the KNH Centre for Forensic Egyptology based at the University of Manchester and the Manchester Museum.
After a good amount of work, the idea for an electronic patient record for an Ancient Egyptian Mummy was conceived. So MEPR, or Mummy Electronic Patient Record, was developed as a Ruby on Rails on-line application that implements the Dakhleh
Oasis Mummy Records as an electronic database. A prototype can be
accessed on-line, using 'admin@example.com' as the e-mail address and 'password' as the password. It was this that was presented with a paper submitted detailing the work done in implementing MEPR, and more significantly the work leading up to its inception. The paper itself will appear in some form (not quite as a paper, for reasons that will be clarified in due course) in the near future, that at least will be posted here the day it's done.
