Timecapsule: Combining botanical and pharmaceutical heritage

data from different sources in time and space

Toine Pieters

Utrecht University // Descartes Centre for the History and Philosophy of the Sciences

and the Humanities

April 22, 2023

Project Time Capsule(Oct. 2013-Oct. 2017)

Project Time Capsule(Oct. 2013-Oct. 2017)

Mission: the development of a digital data platform for

ethno-pharmacological knowledge (1550-1850), as a tool for medical historical and ethnobotanical research and educational purposes

Inspiration

Andy Warhol's largest collecting project (early '70s until his death in 1987): 600 cardboard boxes

How to fill the virtual boxes and how to move them in time and space?

Building an ontology that will facilitate cross-database queries and information retrieval

What are the user demands/needs?

C. Haris Saslis-Lagoudakis et al., 'Phylogenies reveal predictive power of traditional medicine in bioprospecting', Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) (2012)

Purpose: historical mapping of the circulation of pharmaceutical knowledge

The history of botany = the history of pharmacy

April 22, 2023

Dutch commodity chains: trading food, medicines and poisons

Building an ontology that will facilitate cross-database queries and information retrieval

How can this be achieved?

Designing an ontology

linking different kinds of data by means of semantic relationships

April 22, 2023

An iterative strategy for the co-construction of ontology technology by users and developers

National Herbarium(Naturalis)

Heritage resources

Cultural Heritage Agency (RCE)

DutchRoyalLibrary

Sound and Vision Institute

Towards a national thesaurus

Meertens Inst.