SNAP:DRGN uses the LAWD ontology to define persons and other person-like entities in our contributing datasets. A LAWD Person is a CIDOC-CRM E21_Person.
LAWD defines a top-level class “Agent” (lawd:Agent), and four sub-classes:
We’ve been discussing lately how to merge person records in SNAP, so that when we encounter partner projects that each have a record for the same person, SNAP can provide a useful service by combining those into single, merged records, and we can start to get an idea of the requirements for performing operations like merges on our data. This discussion has proved something of a rabbit hole. Continue reading You Aren’t Gonna Need It
One question that came up during the workshop a couple of weeks ago was: if partner projects already assign their own URIs/ids to their person/name/etc. records, then why should SNAP assign its own identifiers? There are two answers to that, one very practical, and the other a bit more philosophical.
Last week, Faith gave a great overview of some of the issues involved in describing the relationships between people. This week, I’m going to come at the problem from the other side, looking at what data we have, and how SNAP plans to represent them.
Our initial datasets include Trismegistos People (TM, described by Mark), the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names (LGPN, described by Sebastian), and a set of names (article headwords) from the Prosopographia Imperii Romani, 2nd edition (PIR²) put together by Tom Elliott. TM has web pages that document the references to names and people found in papyri, many of which are hosted at Papyri.info, as well as resources describing the names and person; references, names, and persons all have unique identifiers. LGPN comes at the problem of modeling people from a different angle. They start with persons and add names and references; persons and names have unique identifiers. From PIR², we have only persons, with a “principal” name and identifying number (the article number) attached to them. Continue reading Tensions