New users can register from the Login page. Accounts are free -- but registration is required to access the cyberSW database.

Access tiers:

1. General public: any user who completes the registration, agrees to our terms of service, and confirms their account (via an email sent to the user) will have access to the cyberSW database via our Explore application. All site and artifact data are available at this tier, but sensitive site locations are masked.
2. Approved researcher: contact us to access the database with more-accurate site locations. Note that actual site locations will remain masked for all users, but the degree of error is considerably less for Approved researchers. Provide a detailed explanation of why you need greater spatial accuracy for your research and we will change your account.

In the coming months, the cyberSW team will assemble a suite of tutorials to introduce different types of users to the database. Meanwhile, this page describes the main features of the database gateway.

Once logged in, the Explore page loads with a map of the greater Southwest. This search tool is how users identify sites and artifacts for further analysis. To save those sites for analysis or download of artifact data, complete a search as described below and then click on the underlined Save Sites for Analysis link next to the search button.

Site Exploration provides a few different ways of selecting sites.

1. Select by spatial boundaries: Governmental units (states, counties) or hydrological units (river basins, watershed subdivisions) are some of the built-in options for constraining the search area. Select one of these options from the drop-down menu. Alternately, you can draw your own polygon. Click the ADD BOUNDARY button and then the SEARCH button to show all of the sites within the drawn boundary.
2. Select by temporal: Choose a time range for which the site was believed to have been occupied. A site will be selected if the site's occupation period overlaps with the input period.
3. Select by feature types present at sites: Check the boxes for sites with the architectural features of interest. Click the SEARCH button to show all of the sites with the selected features (NOTE: this feature only works for certain kinds of structures, e.g., platform mounds, great kivas, and ball courts).
4. Select by artifact types present at sites: Select an artifact class/type (e.g., a ceramic ware and type) from the drop-down menu. Click the SEARCH button to show all of the sites with the selected artifacts.

Material Exploration provides a visual display of the density of a selected artifact type as a heat map.

1. Select an artifact class/type (e.g., a ceramic ware and type) from the drop-down menu. Click the SEARCH button to show all of the sites with the selected artifacts.
2. The results will be displayed as a heat map indicating which areas have higher concentrations of the selected artifact type. This display can be fine-tuned by adjusting the zoom of the map, and the scale of the buffer around site locations (we recommend trying several settings).
3. The heat map generated can then be saved for later use in presentations, posters, or research papers (use the camera icon in the upper right-hand corner).
4. By default, the closer the percentage of that artifact's type is to 100% of the artifacts found at the site, the more opaque and red it becomes. In the case where an artifact type is very rare, it may be impossible to see it on a heatmap. In this case, using "use local extrema" will make it so that the highest percentage is used as the most opaque and red rather than 100%, making rare artifacts types easier to see.

Site Search allows the user to look for individual sites by name or number.

1. Enter the site name (or partial name) into the text box.
2. Or choose the database system and the site's ID in that database.
3. Click SEARCH.

Transition from Explore to Analyze

1. When Save Sites for Analysis is selected from the Explore page, a window pops up to confirm. Check sites to be included in later analyses (you will have the option to confirm this later).
2. Select the Analyze page from the top menu bar. Note that new tools available for analysis are frequently added, and many of the options are provided as a proof-of-concept that we will develop further in the near future. Currently cyberSW hosts a mix of built-in tools and a handful of tools linked to other sources. The analysis tools include citations for full documentation, but we will be adding more-thorough local documentation as time allows.
3. From the Analyze page, the options in the upper right-hand corner (Review Sites, Export, and Import) allow the user to select and save listed sites to a text file, which can be brought in for later re-use, or distributed to other interested researchers.

To run an analysis

1. Simply select from the drop-down menu, confirm sites and artifact types, and click RUN.
2. The analysis will be queued and executed depending on available compute resources. It may help to refresh the page, but the completed job will show up in the completed analyses section of the page.
3. NOTE: Normal users can only save one analysis at one time, approved researcher can save three analyses.
4. Completed analyses have buttons to save the results as delimited text files.

The cyberSW team plans to grow the underlying database, develop the exploration app, and add to the analysis toolkit so that our community of users can share their results. Features (current and planned) include publication-quality figures, such as maps and bar charts.

For example, a jpg of a map can be saved by clicking the camera icon in the upper left corner of the map. Similarly, the results of a ceramic UPDA can be saved as completed figures (or the output from the analysis exported).