The SNAP Project is proud to announce the Ontologies for Prosopography: Who’s Who? or, Who was Who? one-day workshop developed in conjunction with the People of the Founding Era project based at the University of Virginia. The workshop will give the opportunity for SNAP to present our data model to a wider audience and engage with the researchers working on similar problems other periods and geographic areas.

The morning session will be devoted to the presentation of the methodologies used by different projects and discussion of the needs of researchers working with historic person data and how they have been, and can be, addressed. Building on this, the afternoon will offer the option of smaller focused discussions or hands-on, practical sessions in which attendees will have the opportunity to discuss their own data with experts and how they can publish it as structured linked data.

The short description of the workshop, as seen on the DH2013 website, is below. A more detailed description can be http://www.stoa.org/archives/1953

Summary:

Historical data about people, their names, their attributes, and their relationships is one of the most common types of data for projects to expose and yet an area which is falling behind others in the move to the digital data publication and exchange.

The morning session ‘Modelling the Person’, will address the issues of modelling historical persons with presentations and discussions on practices from a range of existing, or emerging, projects and models that attempt to capture information about historical persons using structured models that are compatible with semantic web thinking — models such as the SNAP:DRGN, CIDOC-CRM/FRBRoo, the factoid model, SNAC, etc, plus any others that participants are already using to model their data. Building on these presentations the workshop looks towards finding whether a cross-project consensus on standards and best practice is possible.
The workshop will continue in the afternoon with a session on ‘Linking the Person’. Attendees will have the opportunity to continue the morning’s theoretical discussion or breakout into other areas with a choice of smaller groups focusing on the technical and practical issues of linking the person and name data from different projects together including hands-on sessions on preparing and publishing prosopographical and onomastic datasets as structured data (attendees are encouraged to bring their own datasets if they choose to take part in one of the hands-on breakout groups).

Audience:

This workshop will particularly appeal to prosopographers, biographers, genealogists, classicists, social historians and those working with resources where persons are mentioned during the Greco-Roman and connected periods or during the foundation of America.

The workshop will also appeal to ontologists and technologists and developers with an interest in structured and open, linked data who are dealing with data related to historical people and names. The breakout groups in the afternoon will cater for all levels of technical ability.

Although some of the projects showcased in this workshop focus on specific periods such as the Greco-Roman world and the foundation of America, the issues raised are applicable to all historical eras and loci and participation by researchers from all periods and areas are encouraged and welcomed.