PELAGIOSInterlinking Ancient World Research Resources Through Place

Elizabeth FitzGeraldInstitute of Educational Technology, The Open University

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

III. Expose metadata about your dataset using the VoID 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

Project plan

WP1: Cataloguing service: discover and index content on the open Web for use by Pelagios

WP2: Discovery service: provide super users with a way in which to query place and space-based terms from the data

WP3: Visualisation service: provide end users with intuitive and user-friendly tools and interfaces (or “widgets”) to visualise data from WP1 and WP2 + evaluation of these widgets

WP4: The Pelagios2 Community toolkit: creation and documentation of a toolkit of information and resources to allow all users to access services provided in WP1-3

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The role of IET

Responsible for Work Package 3: developing and evaluating 3-4 widgets to visualise Pelagios-indexed data

Team consists of Agnes Kukulska-Hulme, Liz FitzGerald, Juliette Culver, Andrew Brasher and Will Woods

Progress to date: Eliciting user needs from super users and end users Widget brainstorming session and online questionnaire (user-centred

design of widgets) Development of first widget – initial testing happening next week Graphic design

Yet to come: Further widget development, testing and iteration cycles Project finishes in July 2012

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Challenges | Some Issues Identified So Far

Issues with automatic matching (data or in-house Gazetteer) Name-based matching based on Pleiades or Pleiades+ toponyms [1] 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…)

Interesting issues around understanding what data is there and how it might be useful, particularly in helping to learn about the Ancient World

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

Summary

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”

This will be done by a web-crawling service to discover data; a query service to run queries across diverse and non-standardised data

sources; and a visualisation service

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Thank you for listening

Check the blog to get all the latest updates:http://pelagios-project.blogspot.com

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