All posts by Faith Lawrence

State of the Snap-Nation

With the end of the pilot project scarily in sight it is time to review where we are and where we hope to be by the end of December.

The big news is that (hopefully) the first set of SNAP identifiers are now frozen!

What this means is that for the first 5 datasets have now been ingested and had SNAP identifiers linked to each of the persons and those identifiers are fixed. There may still be a few tweaks to the RDF descriptive data coming in from the projects but the identifiers will remain the same. Continue reading State of the Snap-Nation

Looking Towards an API for SNAP:DRGN

During the first SNAP:DRGN workshop a breakout group was convened to discuss the potential API for the project. Rather than come up with a specific API during that session, we instead focused on creating a “wish list” of applications and functions that we wanted to support. We were then able to abstract the functions that would be needed to support the list. Continue reading Looking Towards an API for SNAP:DRGN

The Old Classes vs Properties Debate (or Relationships Are Hard, Part 2)

One of the decisions that has to be made when creating an ontology is which concepts you encode as classes and which you encode as properties of those classes. One of the difficulties is that there is no overarching ‘right answer’ (although there are wrong ones) to how you should model your domain, in has to be decided on a case-by-case basis of what works best for the type of world view that you are trying to encapsulate within your model. This post is a request for feedback to help us decide which model works best for both the project and the wider community. Continue reading The Old Classes vs Properties Debate (or Relationships Are Hard, Part 2)

SNAP at Digital Humanities 2014

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. Continue reading SNAP at Digital Humanities 2014

Relationships Are Never Easy…

People are inherently social creatures. This means any project about people almost always has to deal with the relationships between people. In this, SNAP:DRGN is no exception. Since this is not a new problem there are a number of different models that already exist and are in use in other projects. Ideally we would reuse an existing, standard ontology to describe the relationships—this would allow us to be easily compatible with other similar projects that had (one hopes) gone through a similar thought process and came to the same conclusion. Continue reading Relationships Are Never Easy…