OCHRE Projects

More than 60 multi-person research projects based at 17 universities in the United States, Canada, and Europe are currently using OCHRE. The members of these projects, representing a range of disciplines, have been involved in testing the software and proposing new features over the past several years. Many of the current projects deal with data from the ancient Mediterranean and Middle East, in keeping with the research focus of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, where the software tools have been developed. However, OCHRE is not limited to this region and can be used for research pertaining to any period in any part of the world.

Each project has a “project administrator” master account, which is used to create password-protected user accounts for project team members so they can enter and modify data in the OCHRE database. Each user account has specific privileges for viewing, editing, and deleting the database items of a particular project, and these privileges can vary based on the item category. No one can see or edit a project’s data without being given explicit permission to do so. The project administrator can publish some or all of the project’s data to the Web for viewing and searching in browser and mobile apps via the OCHRE Web API. Participating projects pay modest annual fees during the period when they are actively adding or modifying their data. In return, they receive long-term data hosting as well as technical support and training. 

To sign up your project or get more information, please contact Sandra Schloen, the manager of technical support and training for OCHRE at the University of Chicago.