Reflections from the Pelagios Commons by Leif Isaksen, Lancaster University. http://commons.pelagios.org. Presentation at the 1st Lancaster Data Conversations 30 January 2017

1. 30 January 2017, Lancster Data Conversations
Reflections from the Pelagios Commons
Leif Isaksen, Lancaster University
http://commons.pelagios.org
@Pelagiosproject
Does Linked Data Have to be Open?

2. Pleiades
PastPlace
Getty Thesauri
PeriodO
ChronOntology
Canonical Text Services
SENESCHAL
SNAP
OCRE
…
Google Ancient Places (OU, Soton)
Perseus Digital Library (Tufts)
Arachne (Cologne)
SPQR (King's College, London)
Digital Memory Engineering (AIT)
Open Context (UC Berkeley)
CLAROS (Oxford)
PtolemyMachine (Holy Cross)
Ure Museum (Reading)
FastiOnline (AIAC)
Nomisma (ANS)
Regnum Francorum Online
Papyri.info (ISAW/NYU)
Ports Antiques
Oracc (U. Penn.)
Meketre (Vienna)
OCRE (ANS/ISAW)
Squinchpix
ORBIS (Stanford)
MJBC (Cambridge)
ISAW Papers (ISAW)
Totenbuch (Bonn/Cologne)
PAS (The British Museum)
SAWS (KCL/Uppsala/Stockholm/Vienna)
Trismegistos (K. U. Leuven)
AWMC (Chapel Hill)
Encyclopaedia of the Hellenic World
DM Project (Drew)
Ancient History Encyclopedia
Dickinson College Commentaries
Edinburgh Geoparser (Edinburgh)
EDH (Heidelberg)
EAGLE
LGPN (Oxford)
...
Linked Pasts| An Emerging Digital Ecosystem
Resource Curators
Concept Schemes
Connecting
Infrastructure
& Support

3. What is Pelagios?
A Decentralised
Community & Infrastructure
for Linked Open Geodata in the Humanities

4. 4
Connectivity through common references rather than a common schemaConnectivity through common references rather than a common schema
What Pelagios isn’t | One ring to rule them all
 Not a data aggregator
 Not a repository
 Not a standard data model

5. The concept | Don’t Unify the Model – Annotate!
5
pleiades:579885
(Athenae)
pleiades:570685
(Sparta)

6. Pleiades
Ancient
World
Resources
Pelagios
Pelagios network | Interlinking different knowledge
communities

7. Towards a digital scholarship | Future Footnotes

8. API v.3 query (‘Peripleo’) | Searching by place

9. API v.3 query | The Pelagios network of different traditions

11. Things we’ve learned | 1. Open partnerships are more efficient than closed
consortia
Linking data is a social process:
•Involves multiple datasets, organisations, roles
•Inertia in one area has knock-on effects in many others
•Restricting visibility in one area reduces impact in others
•Greater likelihood of failure due to policy decsions
•Open partnerships more likely to:
• Attract new members
• Drive sectoral change

12. Stuff we’ve learned | 2. Speed-reading?
Sources:
•Internet Archive
•Hathi Trust /
(Google Books)
•Eighteenth Century
Collections Online (2)
115 books (in 2 days) – 17/18/19th
Century
•75 Books with historical descriptions of Forres
•40 books with no references
•16 inaccessible

13. Online
Offline
HathiTrust Nat. Lib. Scotland
Senate House Lib., London
??

14. Stuff we’ve learned | You can’t do it all by yourself
Metadata
Visual content
Character encoded
Structured
Semantically tagged
Semantically modelled