PELAGIOSInterlinking Ancient World Research Resources Through PlaceElton BarkerThe Open University

Leif IsaksenUniversity of Southampton

Rainer SimonAustrian Institute of Technology

February 2, 2012 | Berlin, Germany

What? | Aims of Pelagios

Interlinking data about the Ancient World using Linked Open Data (LOD) methods

Focus on place references (in maps, texts,images, database tables)

Establishing simple “Pelagios Principles” tosupport contributors in preparingtheir data

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Who? | The Pelagios Collective

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The Open University University of Southampton Austrian Institute of Technology Pleiades Arachne Claros Fasti Online Google Ancient Places nomisma.org

Open Context Perseus Digital Library Ptolemy Machine SPQR Ure Museum

How? | Don’t Unify the Model – Annotate!

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pleiades:579885

(Athenae)

pleiades:570685

(Sparta)

How? | Don’t Unify the Model – Annotate!

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The Pelagios Principles

I. Annotate your place references with appropriate entries in the Pleiades Gazetteer

II. Publish annotations in the Open Annotation (OAC) RDF vocabulary

Why? | Piecing the Puzzle Together

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Why? | Example: The Graph Explorer

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Exploring Relations betweenPlaces through Data

Exploring Relations betweenData through Place

Challenges | Some Issues Identified So Far

Issues with automatic matching (data or in-house Gazetter) Name-based matching based on Pleiades or Pleiades+ [1] toponyms Followed by coordinate matching for verification/disambiguation

Granularity & vague references (South Italy, Greek Islands)

Location-based adjectives (Corinthian vs. Corinth)

Typing of place references Find spot vs. origin, “depicts”, etc. Uncertain references (probably made in…, from the vicinity of…)

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[1] Pleiades+ toponym extension to Pleiades based on Geonameshttp://googleancientplaces.wordpress.com/pleiades/

Discussion | Annotation vs. Unified Model

The goal of Pelagios is to create links rather than to aggregate and enrich provide a toolkit & an API rather than a “single point of access”

Pelagios requests that partners map data to a vocabulary rather than their metadata schema to another

The fact that Pelagios is limited in scope helps! Restriction to Place Very limited set of “primitives” – Dataset, (typed?) Annotation, Place

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Thank you for your attention

http://pelagios-project.blogspot.comQuestions!

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