Oxford Archaeology is a Registered British Charity and the largest organization to
provide archaeological contract services in Europe, employing nearly 300 people. We
are committed to applying open source solutions to our IT needs at all levels on both
economic and philosophical grounds, as well as applying similar principles of
interoperability and standardisation to the data from our archaeological
investigations. However, whilst spatial information is often at the heart of what we
do, it is in creating a Spatial Data Infrastructure  that we have found our greatest
challenges to going open source. Whilst some of these issues are specific to the
individual needs of O.A., it is clear to us that the majority of them are shared by
all newcomers to FOSS4G.

The paper presented will document both those challenges and our successes and
hopefully stimulate an open-minded but lively debate about the barriers which reduce
FOSS4G take-up in the enterprise sector. Areas addressed will include standards and
integration, platform-dependence, documentation, legacy systems, and fee-based
proprietary alternatives. Further to this, we will propose the development of a
loose-knit, but pluggable and standardized open source toolkit and manual for spatial
data  management that gives the uninitiated a clear entrance-point into the emergent
world of community-based geoinformatics. We hope that the ensuing discussion will be
an opportunity to explore ways of bringing such development aidscloser to reality.