I think it's safe to say that, thanks to the PELAGIOS partner institutions, that we do have a Graph of Ancient World Data (GAWD) on the web. It's still in early stages, and one has to do some downloading, unzipping, and so forth to engage with it at the moment, but indeed the long-awaited day has dawned.
Here's the perspective, as of last Friday, from the vantage point of Pleiades. I've used SPARQL to query the GAWD for all information resources that the partners claim (via their RDF data dumps) are related to Pleiades information resources. I.e., I'm pulling out a list of information resources about texts, pictures, objects, grouped by their relationships to what Pleiades knows about ancient places (findspot, original location, etc.). I've sorted that view of the graph by the titles Pleiades gives to its place-related information resources and generated an HTML view of the result. It's here for your browsing pleasure.
Next Steps and Desiderata
For various technical reasons, I'm not yet touching the data of a couple of PELAGIOS partners (CLAROS and SPQR), but the will hopefully be resolved soon. I still need to dig into figuring out what Open Context is doing on this front. Other key resources -- especially those emanating from ISAW -- are not yet ready to produce RDF (but we're working on it).
There are a few things I'd like the PELAGIOS partners to consider/discuss adding to their data:
- Titles/labels for the information resources (using rdfs:label?). This would make it possible for me to produce more intuitive/helpful labels for users of my HTML index. Descriptions would be cool too. As would some indication of the type of thing(s) a given resource addresses (e.g., place, statue, inscription, text)
- Categorization of the relationships between their information resources and Pleaides information resources. Perhaps some variation of the terms originally explored by Concordia (whence the GAWD moniker), as someone on the PELAGIOS list has already suggested.
What would you like to see added to the GAWD? What would you do with it?
That's excellent! BTW regarding labels: in fact most of the partners already do include some sort of labeling - although not according to one common convention.
ReplyDeleteE.g. nomisma has dcterms:title (see http://is.gd/hDbqqz); GAP currently assigns labels to books rather than individual annotations (see http://is.gd/l3TwSL) and so on. But labeling is one thing we're currently addressing in Pelagios 2, as part of our work on a sitemap convention. (This should also solve the bazillion files issue, BTW.)