SNAP is part of an ecology of interlocking Linked Open Data initiatives, sometimes referred to as the Graph of Ancient World Data (GAWD). A forthcoming special issue of ISAW papers gives a helpful overview of the breadth of this community and its interests. One of the strengths of this approach is that each project contributes to and benefits from activities elsewhere and thus the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. One of these projects, Pelagios, plays a complementary role to SNAP by connecting online documents to places, rather than people. Pelagios has now been running since February 2011 – this blog post provides a little background to it and perhaps even indicate possible future directions of travel for SNAP. Continue reading Pelagios and SNAP
Monthly Archives: March 2014
Upcoming workshop on SNAP ontology and data
Next week we shall be hosting a small workshop (already fully booked) at King’s College London to introduce a selection of potential project partners, data providers, advisors and other stakeholders to the SNAP:DRGN project.
The principal aims of the workshop include:
- Introduce the goals of the SNAP:DRGN project, the core datasets (LGPN, TM, PIR) and their current formats and contents, and the data models and ontologies that we propose to use for the preliminary data ingest.
- Learn about other prosopographical and linked data approaches in use in history and the digital humanities.
- Learn about other classical person datasets that might be suitable for exposing in SNAP-recommended RDF format and adding to our triplestore.
Continue reading Upcoming workshop on SNAP ontology and data
Tensions
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
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…