Talk given on 27 March 2012 at the Institute of Educational Technology, as part of the OU's Digital Humanities seminar series.

1. PELAGIOS
Interlinking Ancient World Research Resources
Through Place
Elizabeth FitzGerald
Institute of Educational Technology, The Open University

2. What? | Aims of Pelagios
 Interlinking data about the Ancient World using Linked Open Data (LOD)
methods
 Focus on place references (in maps, texts,
images, database tables)
 Establishing simple “Pelagios Principles” to
support contributors in preparing
their data
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3. Who? | The Pelagios Collective
 The Open University  Open Context
 University of Southampton  Perseus Digital Library
 Austrian Institute of Technology  Ptolemy Machine
 Pleiades  SPQR
 Arachne  Ure Museum
 Claros
 Fasti Online
 Google Ancient Places
 nomisma.org
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4. How? | Don’t Unify the Model – Annotate!
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5. How? | Don’t Unify the Model – Annotate!
The Pelagios Principles
I. Annotate your place references with appropriate entries in the
Pleiades Gazetteer
II. Publish annotations in the Open Annotation (OAC) RDF vocabulary
III. Expose metadata about your dataset using the VoID vocabulary
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6. Why? | Piecing the Puzzle Together
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7. Why? | Example: The Graph Explorer
Exploring Relations between Exploring Relations between
Places through Data Data through Place
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8. Project plan
 WP1: Cataloguing service: discover and index content on the open Web for
use by Pelagios
 WP2: Discovery service: provide super users with a way in which to query
place and space-based terms from the data
 WP3: Visualisation service: provide end users with intuitive and user-
friendly tools and interfaces (or “widgets”) to visualise data from WP1
and WP2 + evaluation of these widgets
 WP4: The Pelagios2 Community toolkit: creation and documentation of a
toolkit of information and resources to allow all users to access services
provided in WP1-3
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9. The role of IET
 Responsible for Work Package 3: developing and evaluating 3-4 widgets to
visualise Pelagios-indexed data
 Team consists of Agnes Kukulska-Hulme, Liz FitzGerald, Juliette Culver,
Andrew Brasher and Will Woods
 Progress to date:
 Eliciting user needs from super users and end users
 Widget brainstorming session and online questionnaire (user-centred
design of widgets)
 Development of first widget – initial testing happening next week
 Graphic design
 Yet to come:
 Further widget development, testing and iteration cycles
 Project finishes in July 2012
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10. Challenges | Some Issues Identified So Far
 Issues with automatic matching (data or in-house Gazetteer)
 Name-based matching based on Pleiades or Pleiades+ toponyms [1]
 Followed by coordinate matching for verification/disambiguation
 Granularity & vague references (South Italy, Greek Islands)
 Location-based adjectives (Corinthian vs. Corinth)
 Typing of place references
 Find spot vs. origin, “depicts”, etc.
 Uncertain references (probably made in…, from the vicinity of…)
 Interesting issues around understanding what data is there and how it might
be useful, particularly in helping to learn about the Ancient World
[1] Pleiades+ toponym extension to Pleiades based on Geonames
http://googleancientplaces.wordpress.com/pleiades/ 10

11. Summary
 The goal of Pelagios is to
 create links rather than to aggregate and enrich
 provide a toolkit & an API rather than a “single point of access”
 This will be done by
 a web-crawling service to discover data;
 a query service to run queries across diverse and non-standardised data
sources;
 and a visualisation service
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12. Thank you for listening
Check the blog to get all the latest updates:
http://pelagios-project.blogspot.com
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