Semantic Web, Scholarly Resources for Antiquity and the Museum

Our on-going work on geographically functional, cross-resource, machine-actionable citation(!) with the Web continues to get more interesting.

The kickoff was, of course, the joint NEH/JISC grant that is (under the rubric of the Concordia project) funding our look at this in collaboration with the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King's College, London. Our two workshops (and lots of discussion with other parties in between) have led us through KML, Atom+GeoRSS, citation vocabularies and OAI/ORE on to Cool URIs, Linked Data, CIDOC CRM and more.

Traffic is now building on the Graph of Ancient World Data discussion group (e.g., Sebastian Heath's post on coin hoard data at nomisma.org). Yesterday, Sean Gillies rolled out some changes to the Pleiades interface that provide #this endpoints for Pleiades places, so that Sebastian and others can make explicit reference either to the historical places themselves (non-information resources cited like http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/639166#this) or our descriptions of them on the web (information resources, cited like http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/639166/).

And then this afternoon I came across the latest Talis Semantic Web podcast, featuring Koven Smith on Semantic Web initiatives at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 38 minutes well-spent. They're thinking about and exploring a number of the approaches and technologies we're interested in, but from a museum perspective. It would be interesting to discuss how these methods could be used to better bridge gaps between museums, field archaeologists, epigraphers, numismatists, papyrologists, prosopographers, historical geographers, librarians, archivists and the rest!