horothesia

Playing with PELAGIOS: The GAWD is Live

2012-02-06T11:56:00.000-05:00

The is the lastest in an on-going series chronicling my dalliances with data published by the PELAGIOS project partners.

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?

Playing with PELAGIOS: Dealing with a bazillion RDF files

2012-02-02T15:48:00.001-05:00

Latest in a Playing with PELAGIOS series

Some of the PELAGIOS partners distribute their annotation RDF in a relatively small number of files. Others (like SPQR and ANS) have a very large number of files. This makes the technique I used earlier for adding triples to the database ungainly. Fortunately, 4store provides some command line methods for loading triples.

First, stop the 4store http server (why?):

$ killall 4s-httpd

Try to import all the RDF files. Rats!

$ 4s-import -a pelagios *.rdf
-bash: /Applications/4store.app/Contents/MacOS/bin/4s-import: Argument list too long

Bash to the rescue (but note that doing one file at a time has a cost on the 4store side):

$ for f in *.rdf; do 4s-import -av pelagios $f; done
Reading <file:///Users/paregorios/Documents/files/P/pelagios-data/coins/0000.999.00000.rdf>
Pass 1, processed 10 triples (10)
Pass 2, processed 10 triples, 8912 triples/s
Updating index
Index update took 0.000890 seconds
Imported 10 triples, average 4266 triples/s
Reading <file:///Users/paregorios/Documents/files/P/pelagios-data/coins/0000.999.101.rdf>
Pass 1, processed 11 triples (11)
Pass 2, processed 11 triples, 9856 triples/s
Updating index
Index update took 0.000936 seconds
Imported 11 triples, average 4493 triples/s
Reading <file:///Users/paregorios/Documents/files/P/pelagios-data/coins/0000.999.10176.rdf>
Pass 1, processed 8 triples (8)
Pass 2, processed 8 triples, 6600 triples/s
Updating index
Index update took 0.000892 seconds
Imported 8 triples, average 3256 triples/s
...

This took a while. There are 86,200 files in the ANS annotation batch.

Note the use of the -a option on 4s-import to ensure the triples are added to the current contents of the database, rather than replacing them! Note also the -v option, which is what gives you the report (otherwise, it's silent and that makes my ctrl-c finger twitchy).

Now, back to the SPARQL mines.

Playing with PELAGIOS: Arachne was easy after nomisma

2012-02-01T18:18:00.000-05:00

Querying Pleiades annotations out of Arachne RDF was as simple as loading the Arachne Objects by Places RDF file into 4store the same way I did nomisma and running the same SPARQL query. Cost: 5 minutes. Now I know about 29 objects in the Arachne database that they think are related to Akragas/Agrigentum. For example:

41149: Sarkophag mit dem Hippolytosmythos (Agrigent, S. Nicola):
http://arachne.uni-koeln.de/entity/1098273 == http://arachne.uni-koeln.de/item/objekt/41149
75: Statue des Apollon (Agrigent, Museo Civico): http://arachne.uni-koeln.de/entity/1060434 == http://arachne.uni-koeln.de/item/objekt/75
75000: Atlant des Olympieions von Agrigent (Akragas, Agrigentum, Agrigento): http://arachne.uni-koeln.de/entity/1111253 == http://arachne.uni-koeln.de/item/objekt/75000

Playing with PELAGIOS: Nomisma

2012-02-01T16:57:00.000-05:00

So, I want to see how hard it is to query the RDF that PELAGIOS partners are putting together. The first experiment is documented below.

Step 1: Set up a Triplestore (something to load the RDF into and support queries)

Context: I'm a triplestore n00b.

I found Jeni Tennison's Getting Started with RDF and SPARQL Using 4store and RDF.rb and, though I had no interest in messing around with Ruby as part of this exercise, the recommendation of 4store as a triplestore sounded good, so I went hunting for a Mac binary and downloaded it.

Step 2: Grab RDF describing content in Nomisma.org

Context: I'm a point-and-click expert.

I downloaded the PELAGIOS-conformant RDF data published by Nomisma.org at http://nomisma.org/nomisma.org.pelagios.rdf.

Background: "Nomisma.org is a collaborative effort to provide stable digital representations of numismatic concepts and entities, for example the generic idea of a coin hoard or an actual hoard as documented in the print publication An Inventory of Greek Coin Hoards (IGCH)."

Step 3: Fire up 4store and load in the nomisma.org

Context: I'm a 4store n00b, but I can cut and paste, read and reason, and experiment.

Double-clicked the 4store icon in my Applications folder. It opened a terminal window.

To create and start up an empty database for my triples, I followed the 4store instructions and Tennison's post (mutatis mutandis) and so typed the following in the terminal window ("pelagios" is the name I gave to my database; you could call yours "ray" or "jay" if you like):

$ 4s-backend-setup pelagios
$ 4s-backend pelagios

Then I started up 4store's SPARQL http server and aimed it at the still-empty "pelagios" database so I could load my data and try my hand at some queries:

$ 4s-httpd pelagios

Loading the nomisma data was then as simple as moving to the directory where I'd saved the RDF file and typing:

$ curl -T nomisma.org.pelagios.rdf 'http://localhost:8080/data/http://nomisma.org/nomisma.org.pelagios.rdf/'

Note how the URI base for nomisma items is appended to the URL string passed via curl. This is how you specify the "model URI" for the graph of triples that gets created from the RDF.

Step 4: Try to construct a query and dig out some data.

Context: I'm a SPARQL n00b, but I'd done some SQL back in the day and XML and namespaces are pretty much burned into my soul at this point.

Following Tennison's example, I pointed my browser at http://localhost:8080/test/. I got 4store's SPARQL test query interface. I googled around looking grumpily at different SPARQL "how-tos" and "getting starteds" and trying stuff and pondering repeated failure until this worked:


PREFIX rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#>
PREFIX rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#>
PREFIX foaf: <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/>
PREFIX oac: <http://www.openannotation.org/ns/>

SELECT ?x
WHERE {
 ?x oac:hasBody <http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/462086> .
}

That's "find the ID of every OAC Annotation in the triplestore that's linked to Pleiades Place 462086" (i.e., Akragas/Agrigentum, modern Agrigento in Sicily). It's a list like this:

http://nomisma.org/nomisma.org.pelagios.rdf#igch1910-agrigentum-5
http://nomisma.org/nomisma.org.pelagios.rdf#igch2089-agrigentum-24
http://nomisma.org/nomisma.org.pelagios.rdf#igch2101-agrigentum-32
...

51 IDs in all.

But what I really want is a list of the IDs of the nomisma entities themselves so I can go look up the details and learn things. Back to the SPARQL mines until I produced this:

PREFIX rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#>
PREFIX rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#>
PREFIX foaf: <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/>
PREFIX oac: <http://www.openannotation.org/ns/>

SELECT ?nomismaid
WHERE {
 ?x oac:hasBody <http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/462086> .
 ?x oac:hasTarget ?nomismaid .
}

Now I have a list of 51 nomisma IDs: one for the mint and 50 coin hoards that illustrate the economic network in which the ancient city participated (e.g., http://nomisma.org/id/igch2081).

Cost: about 2 hours of time, 1 cup of coffee, and three favors from Sebastian Heath on IRC.

Up next: Arachne, the object database of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut.

Pleiades, Flickr, and the Ancient World Image Bank

2011-12-20T10:42:00.000-05:00

Many of you are already aware that Pleiades, Flickr, and the Ancient World Image Bank have joined forces to link together online, open-access imagery and ancient geographical information. This blog post is intended to answer some lingering questions that users and potential contributors have been asking about the process.

Other Blog Posts

A general notice of the development on the ISAW News Blog (by me)
An extended discussion of the effects, from the Pleiades perspective (by Sean Gillies)
An extended discussion with developers' how-to on the Flickr Code Blog (by Sean Gillies), mirrored on Sean's blog
The blog post here at Horothesia that started it all (by me)

How to Construct a Pleiades Machine Tag

In Flickr, you add the machine tag the same way you add regular tags when editing an individual image or a set or group in the organizer. The machine tag should use the following syntax:

pleiades:TERM=#####

where "TERM" is one of the recognized terms (originally from the Concordia Thesaurus, aka the Graph of Ancient World Data, or GAWD, terms) listed below and "#####" is the numeric identifier of the Pleiades place you wish to associate with the photo.

You can get the identifier by visiting pleiades.stoa.org then searching for and finding the place. Copy the numeric portion of the URL of the place page and paste it into your tag.

So, for example, if I wanted to tag a photo that "depicts" ancient Athens (or a portion thereof), I'd visit Pleiades and search for Athens. I'd find this place page: http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/579885/. So, I'd grab 579885 and construct the following machine tag for use in Flickr:

pleiades:depicts=579885

Recognized Terms in Pleiades Machine Tags

TERMS for use in Pleiades machine tags should begin with a lowercase letter. The following TERMS are recognized in Pleiades machine tags:

depicts: the photo so tagged can be said to "depict" the referenced ancient place or a significant or exemplary portion thereof
(this term is equivalent to CIDOC CRM p62 "depicts")
findspot: the photo so tagged shows an object that was first found in modern times at the referenced ancient place
(this term is particularly useful for items now in museums or elsewhere, especially those no longer at the initial place of finding)
origin: the photo so tagged shows an object that is believed, with reasonably high certainty, to have been originally located or produced at the referenced ancient place
(this can differ from the findspot, as when an inscription or other object was moved in antiquity)
observedAt: the photo so tagged shows an object that was observed in modern times at the referenced ancient place
(the implication being that the place observed is neither the modern findspot nor the presumed original location; I suspect this term will rarely need to be used to link photos with Pleiades place resources)
where: the photo so tagged is related in some way to the referenced ancient place, but for some unspecified reason no more specific relationship can be asserted
(this term should not be used unless none of above terms are deemed to be appropriate)
place: this term is DEPRECATED; it was originally used in exploring the Pleiades machine tag idea (and is highlighted in my previous blog post). Its semantics are assumed to be equivalent to "where". If at all possible, photos carrying this tag should be updated to use one of the more specific terms above.

Please note that pleiades:places=##### (i.e., with a plural) is not a recognized machine tag. Its behavior in Flickr or Pleiades is undefined. So is the behavior of any Pleiades machine tag with a misspelling or a term not included in the list above. ("finspot" seems to be a popular typo at present).

Any photo tagged with the proper Pleiades machine tag syntax and one of the terms above will be noticed by Pleiades and picked up in the summary counts and links on individual place resource pages. In order for a photo to be considered for the Pleiades Places group on Flickr (and therefore as a "portrait image" for a Pleiades place), the photo must be tagged with a pleiades:depicts tag.

How do I Add Pleiades Machine Tags Quickly?

It would be unreasonable of us to ask a prolific photographer with an extensive, well-tagged collection already on Flickr to go through an individually add appropriate machine tags by hand. Fortunately, Flickr provides a mechanism for easy batch editing of tags.

Suppose that you have tagged a large number of your photos with the name of the ancient site (e.g., Halicarnassus)
Visit the following link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/me/alltags/; it will give you an alphabetical list of all your tags.
Find the name of the site and click on the corresponding link. You'll see all the photos thus tagged in your photostream.
Find and click on the "Change this tag" link (Really. Skip "Edit these in a batch" link for now).
Insert the cursor after your existing tag string, type a space, then type or paste in the desired Pleiades machine tag (read the fine print on that page for an extended explanation of what's going on).
Click the "save" button. Flickr will go off and add the new tag to all those images at once.
If you'd rather be more selective about which photos you want to add a tag to, you can choose the "Edit these in a batch" link I told you to skip above, then paste the Pleiades machine tag into the tag lists associated with only those images you wish to update.

Why Can't We Just Use Geotagging That's Already in the Photos?

Some photographers have geotagged their photos, either using a GPS-enabled digital camera or some method of post-processing. I was recently asked on twitter why we're putting people to all the trouble above when we could just use the geotagging? There are several reasons:

Not everybody's photos are machine-tagged.
Many ancient sites are coincident with urban areas (or areas of natural beauty or places where someone took a picture of their dog) and so mere proximity to an ancient site can't be interpreted as indicating a given photo is relevant to a nearby Pleiades place.
Horizontal precision and accuracy can vary widely in geotagged photos as a function of the geotagging method used and the interests and skill of the person doing the geotagging. As a result, a photo might be geotagged at a location closer to another, unrelated pleiades place.
The horizontal precision and accuracy of Pleiades coordinates also varies widely given the varying sources from which it derives and the subsequent coordinate extraction methods. This makes the process of proximity correlation even more fraught.

This is not to say that we're not interested in exploring uses for geotagged photos in Flickr (or supporting a geotag-your-photo-using-Pleiades-coordinates tool), but I hope this discussion helps explain why we like the machine-tag approach for indicating relevance.

Please let me know, via comments here, if you have additional questions or suggestions.

It's all coming together at PELAGIOS

2011-11-04T15:07:00.003-04:00

For years (over a decade in fact) we've been dreaming and talking about linking up ancient world resources on the web along the thematic axis of geography. Pleiades was launched in no small part in pursuit of that vision. And today comes more proof -- to which many can relate -- that hard work, collaboration, and openness bears really tasty fruit.

The Perseus geospatial data now includes annotations of ancient places with Pleiades URIs. Beginning next week, the Places widget in the Perseus interface will include links to download the Pleiades annotations in OAC compliant RDF format. These links will appear for any text with place entity markup which also has places from this dataset. We are also providing a link to search on the top five most frequently mentioned of these places in the Pelagios graph explorer.

(Check out the rest of the story, which provides a screenshot of the interface changes and a step-by-step description of how the work was done).

How did this come to be possible? Here's a very much abridged history:

Perseus built a path-breaking, web-based digital library of resources for the study of the ancient world; released a bunch of their code and content under open licenses; and managed the geographic aspects of the content as data
Pleiades built on and marshaled the efforts of the Classical Atlas Project, the Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilization, and other collaborators to publish an ever-improving geographic dataset on the web under a permissive open license
Leif Isaksen, on behalf of the Google Ancient Places project, took that dataset, mashed it up with another open geographical dataset (GeoNames) and published the results (Pleiades+) under a public domain declaration (more openness).
The PELAGIOS team took Pleiades+ and started matching it with their data. Perseus is just the latest member of that team to do so, and there are more on the way.

The resulting interface enhancements Perseus is announcing today are just the latest visible example of how the web of people benefits from the creation and exploitation of the web of data, and it's all super-charged by openness.

I'm grateful to the hard-working folks, and the array of funding agencies and host institutions, whose commitment and support are making these dreams come true.

Closing in on a Pleiades hack day date

2011-11-03T09:22:00.006-04:00

Thanks to all who have registered their interest in, and availability for, the proposed Pleiades hack day to work on titles and descriptions for "well-known" places. By the close of business today (Thursday, 3 November 2011, US Eastern time), I'll announce the day for the hack day based on the majority availability as indicated in the scheduling poll.

If you want to have an influence over the date selection, please post a comment here or email me and I'll send you a link to the scheduling poll.

Pleiades Hack Day

2011-10-28T11:45:00.002-04:00

I'm thinking it's time. Time we designated a particular day to give over to ganging up on Pleiades content and making it better. Looking at the low-hanging-and-annoying-fruit list, the first thing that comes to mind is improving our titles and descriptions to facilitate discovery and disambiguation. I've laid out what I see as the landscape in a document on the Pleiades site: Improving Titles and Descriptions for Prominent Places.

So what remains is to see who would be willing to devote at least a couple of hours (if not a whole day) to this enterprise and to fix a day for it. You don't need to be an expert to help with this job. Anyone interested at all in ancient geography who has basic web skills and can get on the internet at the scheduled time should be able to make a substantive contribution, whether they are a student, a scholar or an interested "layperson".

If you're interested, leave a comment on my blog and I'll send you a link to a doodle poll to do the scheduling.

Pleiades Google+ Hangout this Wednesday

2011-10-17T10:33:00.000-04:00

Details here.

Describing Pleiades

2011-09-26T11:26:00.003-04:00

Matt Knutzen recently sent me a draft description of the Pleiades project and asked for my thoughts on it. Here's what resulted:

The Pleiades Project (http://pleiades.stoa.org) is a consortially developed, open-source, web-based platform for using, creating, improving and sharing historical geographic information about the ancient world. It employs a unique data model that adapts best-practice and standards in GIS and spatial computing to deal with the unique challenges of sparse, damaged and contested information about ancient places, spaces and names. The project began by adapting and publishing all the data gathered for the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World, but is now working with partners to expand temporally and spatially into Late Antiquity, the Byzantine Empire, the ancient Near East, Egypt and beyond.

Feeds of Flickr Photos Depicting Pleiades Places

2011-09-10T13:51:00.000-04:00

Some months ago, ISAW started adding Pleiades machine tags to the Ancient World Image Bank (AWIB) photos we've been uploading to Flickr. This post will explain what that means, how it might be useful to you and how you can add Pleiades machine tags to your own photos so we can find out about them.

Updated: 8:45pm EDT, 10 September 2011 (changes highlighted in orange).
Updated: 10:43am EST, 20 December 2011 (some of what's here is now superseded by recent developments; see further this new post: Pleiades, Flickr, and the Ancient World Image Bank)

Pleiades Machine Tags

Pleiades is a collaborative, open-access digital gazetteer for the ancient world. AWIB is an open-access publication that uses the Flickr photo-sharing site to publish free, reusable photos of ancient sites and artifacts. Machine tags are an extension to Flickr's basic tag-this-photo functionality that "use a special syntax to define extra information about a tag" (Aaron Straup Cope, "Ladies and Gentlemen: Machine Tags," 24 January 2007).

A Pleiades machine tag looks like this:

pleiades:place=795868

where 795868 is the stable identifier portion of a Pleiades Uniform Resource Identifier (URI). In this example, the URI corresponding to the machine tag above is:

http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/795868

Note what's in common between the machine tag and the URI (highlighted in yellow).

What Pleiades Machine Tags Are Good For

The Flickr API makes it possible to request lists of machine-tagged photos in the RSS webfeed format. So, to get a list of all photos in Flickr that are tagged with the example machine tag above, pop this into your feed reader:

http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=pleiades%3Aplace=795868&lang=en-us&format=rss_200

The same results can be viewed in HTML in a browser by resolving the following:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/pleiades:place=795868

To get a list of all photos in Flickr that are tagged with any Pleiades machine tag, try this (the API syntax supports wildcards!):

http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=pleiades%3Aplace%3D&lang=en-us&format=rss_200

The same results, viewed in HTML on the Flickr site:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/pleiades:place

Feeds like these aren't just for feed readers anymore. You can add user-interface widgets to your blog or website to summarize the latest content for your readers (check out the right-hand column in this blog). You can hook up services like Networked Blogs or Twitterfeed to pass on the latest changes to your Facebook friends or Twitter followers. If you've got a web-facing numismatic database that you've already linked up with Pleiades for the mint locations, you could write custom code to pull a corresponding picture of the ancient site into your web interface (say, alongside the map you've already got).

Add Pleiades Machine Tags to Your Own Photos on Flickr

Many of you have been taking amazing photos of ancient sites and artifacts for years. Many of you have posted some of them to Flickr and shared them with great groups like Chiron, Visibile Parlare - Greek Inscriptions and Visibile Parlare - Latin Inscriptions. If you'd like these photos to appear in queries and feeds (like those described above), right alongside the photos that we're publishing via AWIB, all you have to do is add the appropriate Pleiades machine tags in Flickr. Just look up your site on Pleiades, copy the numeric ID from the URI in your browser's location bar, append it to the string "pleiades:place=" and tag your Flickr photos with it. In this way, you can help us improve findability of good photos of ancient sites and the artifacts found there for everyone on the web. Who knows ... maybe enough people will join us in this effort that we can someday get the Flickr development team to give Pleiades machine tags some extra love.

Kudos to:

Aaron Straup Cope for his blog post "Wildcard Machine Tag URLs" (18 July 2008) that showed me how to construct the API queries necessary to get the RSS feeds described above. That, and the Flickr API documentation on feeds.
Nate Nagy, Managing Editor of AWIB, who applies the tags and keeps AWIB rolling.
Dan Pet, from the Portable Antiquities Scheme, and Ryan Baumann, from the Center for Visualization and Virtual Environments at the University of Kentucky, who put me onto machine tags in the first place and helped me get up to speed.

Zeugma at Pleiades and ISAW

2011-02-25T16:02:00.000-05:00

In honor of Kutal Gorkay's upcoming talk at ISAW (Recent Archaeological Research in Zeugma: March 21, 2011), I've taken the opportunity to update the Zeugma resource at Pleiades. It now has:

a precise location (taken from the visible remains of the theater)
Greek orthography for the name Zeugma (Ζεύγμα) -- I couldn't quickly find a verifiable ancient reference for the other name we inherited from the Barrington: Seleukeia pros to Euphrate
an updated description and place type (settlement)
a modestly expanded "details" section in which I link to Zeugma resources elsewhere (including the official excavation website, Wikipedia, Livius.org and some digital publications by David Walker at the University of Western Australia)

I hope you'll check out both the lecture notice and the Pleiades resource. I'd of course be grateful for comments, corrections and additions to the latter.

And if you think you could do something like this for another Pleiades place resource, by all means, please join up and give it a try. You'll find how-to instructions in my Valentine's Day Pleiades Post. If you've got Irish interests or ancestry, why not pick an ancient site in Ireland to spruce up in celebration of St. Patrick's Day!

Zeugma on Pleiades: http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/658636
Ancient sites in Ireland link courtesy of the spatial search functions Sean Gillies recently added to Pleiades.

Adopt a place for Valentine's day

2011-01-21T17:50:00.001-05:00

Pleiades places are looking for love and this year you can give it to them (it never hurts to get ready for Valentine's Day early). It will only take a few minutes of your time.

Here are some examples of things you could do (many of them quickly) to enhance the content in Pleiades:

Add a modern name for an ancient settlement (see, for example: http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/579885, sub "Names:")

Add Greek orthography to an existing ancient name record that only has a transliteration (compare, for example, http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/638753/stauropolis and http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/599612/arsinoeia)

Add a link to a corresponding entry in:

Wikipedia (e.g., http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/142847211, sub "References:")
The Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Sites at Perseus (e.g., http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/599659, sub "References")
FastiOnline (e.g., http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/481808, sub "References")

Add a link to the website of a current excavation of that site (e.g., http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/550595, sub "Details" and "References")

Add a link to a book in the Internet Archive or Google Books that treats the place or name in question (e.g., http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/638753/ninoe, sub "Primary Reference Citations:")

Flesh out the description of a place

A little bit (e.g., compare http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/912910/ to the original version of the resource, as imported)
A lot (e.g., compare http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/727153 to the original version)

Here are some ways you could use links to Pleiades to enrich content elsewhere on the web

Add a Pleiades URI to a blog post or web site that you author or edit (e.g., http://ancientworldonline.blogspot.com/2011/01/schliemann-diaries-online-at-ascsa.html -- scroll down)
Add a Pleiades URI to comments on a Flickr or Panoramio or Picasa image (e.g., http://www.flickr.com/photos/isawnyu/5054947503/)

Feel free to suggest other ways (with links to examples, where appropriate) in the comments.

How to get started

Are you a registered Pleiades user? If not, please visit the Pleiades Community page and follow the instructions there.

If you are a registered Pleiades user and you want to make a modification to a place resource (improved on 24 January):

log in
use the search box to find the place resource you're interested in changing
select "actions" ... "check out" (this will create a working copy for you)
select the "edit" tab
make and save your changes as many times as you like (you're working on a private copy of the original that only you can see)
once you're happy with the results, select "state: drafting" and change it to "submit for review"
the editors will review your suggested changes and be in touch via email if they have any questions ... otherwise they'll add your name to the "creator" or "contributor" field (as appropriate) and publish the changes so everyone can see them

Get stuck?

Ask a question on the pleiades-community list, to which all Pleiades users are automatically subscribed.

Your Pleiades place is waiting for you!

One User's Experience with Pleiades

2010-10-22T14:19:00.001-04:00

I just finished posting an extended comment on Hethre Contant's consideration of her initial experiences with Pleiades, entitled "Regarding the Pleiades: A Vision of the Future for Mapping the Past." She prepared it as a report for an Urban Media Archaeology class at New School University, taught by Shannon Mattern.

I assume my comment is in queue for moderation. Since I think it (and Heathre's report) are of potential interest to the Pleiades community, I'm re-posting my comments here:

Hi Heathre:

Thanks for giving us your perspective as a new user of Pleiades. It's really helpful to hear how people are trying to use this emerging resource and to see where they run into trouble.

The delay in signing you up initially is an occasional consequence of the fact that our signup procedure is manual and occasionally the editors are unavailable while on travel or the like. I apologize if it put you in a difficult situation time-wise.

We currently have funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support software and content development through April 2013, but editorial work is all volunteer.

We're not finished loading up all the legacy content from the Barrington Atlas. You can read more about the state of that process here: http://pleiades.stoa.org/Members/sgillies/news-items/data-import-round-1 with maps here: http://pleiades.stoa.org/Members/sgillies/figures-import-round-1 .

Since you last looked at the site, Sean has rolled out some improvements to the individual maps. They now show you nearby places as well. See further: http://pleiades.stoa.org/Members/sgillies/news-items/map-of-a-places-neighborhood .

The squares you see on the maps for many places correspond to the grid squares on the Barrington Atlas maps from which they derive. We are currently working with colleagues at Harvard, who have digitized the exact coordinates from the Barrington compilation materials and improved their precision by visually checking them in Google Earth. We anticipate these coordinates will be added to Pleiades by mid-2011, replacing the squares that frustrated you. We'll also have reciprocal links to the Harvard project's online system, the Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilization: http://darmc.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do

"Phokaia" is a transliteration of the ancient Greek, whereas "Phocaea" is the Latin version, used by the Romans and subsequently in the west during the Medieval and Renaissance periods. I'm glad Pleiades was able to help you sort this out, despite the fact that our resources do not yet comprehensively list all the variants for every site. This is something we're encouraging our users to help flesh out.

Please let us know if you have further observations or suggestions (or complaints) about the site.

Best wishes,

Tom

Linking to Google Books Content in an Ancient Geographic Way

2010-07-23T09:33:00.002-04:00

I'm very interested in finding ways through Pleiades and other ISAW digital projects to support the efforts of Leif, Elton and Eric on the "Google Ancient Places (GAP): Discovering historic geographical entities in the Google Books corpus" project. In particular, I'd hope we can integrate this into the web interfaces for our projects:

ECS will work on a Web Service and Web Widget [that] will make it possible for Webmasters to add links to the ancient texts [in Google Books] within their websites, enabling the public and researchers to search for them easily.

New Pleiades Screencast: Add a New Place Manually

2010-07-22T16:17:00.001-04:00

I've just posted a new screencast that, in less than 5 minutes, shows you had to draft a new, rudimentary place resource in Pleiades without recourse to Google Earth or other external tools. Let me know what you think.

Featured Pleiades Content: Strophades/Plotai Inss. and the "Pont Julien"

2010-07-08T13:53:00.004-04:00

Today we've published two updates to the content in Pleiades.

Sean Gillies has contributed updated coordinates and descriptive information for the so-called Pont Julien, a Roman bridge (ancient name, if any, unknown), located to the west of Apta Iulia (mod. Apt) in France. It had been indicated on Barrington Atlas Map 15 E2). The point coordinates Sean provides, as you'll see from the KML if you've got Google Earth, are more precise than the BAtlas map could provide given its scale of 1:500,000 (+/- 930 meters). Their derivation from Google Earth and Geoeye imagery is described in the associated accuracy assessment.

With help from Brian Turner and Richard Talbert, I've remedied an oversight in the Barrington Atlas: the omission of the Στροφάδες/Strophades islands. We'd originally addressed this oversight back in 2003, when I still worked for the Ancient World Mapping Center, having been alerted to the problem by Rick LaFleur. After Sean loaded the legacy information associated with BAtlas Map 1 into Pleiades, I started working on a place resource as well. In so doing, I dug a bit deeper and discovered the ancient tradition of an alternate, earlier name for this peculiar island group: Πλωταί/Plotae. Once again, Google Earth provided us with better coordinates, although not this time without some confusion (see the associated accuracy assessment and the map on the main resource page). I was also able to exploit the greater flexibility provided by Pleiades to enumerate all the attested name variants (including an ethnikon asserted by Stephanus of Byzantium), in their original orthography, and to provide citations of most of the relevant attestations of same in ancient literature.

It's great to see Pleiades moving closer to full-spectrum use. We're no longer just bringing material forward from the Classical Atlas Project, we're also publishing new, more accurate and complete information. I hope that soon you'll be seeing more of this sort of thing, with contributions by a widening community. You can be part of this community, if you're interested: here's how.

Thanks to all, including our editors, who helped get these resources ready to publish.

Transliterating Greek (and Latin)

2010-07-08T09:27:00.003-04:00

A thread on classics-l led to a request by Daniel Riaño that we should release the code we use in Pleiades to transliterate Greek. This code also can be used to verify that a string contains only valid UTF-8 characters for Greek (and also for Latin), prior to running the transliteration. Thanks to Sean's help, it's now released on pypi under a BSD license. Coptic's next.

Share and enjoy!

Ramping up Pleiades 2

2010-06-25T17:15:00.003-04:00

Last March, I alerted readers to the great news that NEH had elected to fund a second round of work on the Pleiades project. We're picking up steam.

Sean Gillies, our chief engineer, has been adding more legacy content inherited from the Classical Atlas Project. We're nearly at the half-way point, with features associated with 48 of the 102 Barrington Atlas maps now represented as Pleiades resources (you can keep score on the Pleiades Content wiki page or monitor the Pleiades news feed for announcements as new content appears). Sean's also introduced a number of improvements to the web application and the user interface, and has been blogging about our data model.

Brian Turner (my co-managing editor) and I have been getting ready to start working on adding some new content that wasn't included in the Barrington, including a number of obscure features from the so-called Peutinger map that turned up during Richard Talbert's work to prepare a new scholarly edition of the map (forthcoming from Cambridge UP). Nico Aravecchia, a Visiting Research Scholar at ISAW, has been working on new Pleiades resources for a number of poorly published and recently excavated Coptic sites in Egypt that also did not appear in the Barrington. We'll start publishing these new resources during the next month as they clear editorial review.

Meanwhile, we've been in dialog with Michael McCormick, Guoping Huang and Kelly Gibson at Harvard. They're the driving force behind the Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilization, with whom we're collaborating under the new grant. Our aim is to collate and share the datasets assembled by both projects and to cross-link our web applications. This will bring more accurate coordinates for many features into Pleiades, as well as a number of new features that will expand our time horizon into the middle ages. You'll get a choice of display and map interaction modes and, eventually, the ability to move back and forth between both resources. We'll keep you posted as the timeline for this portion of the work is refined.

We also aim to make things easier for early adopters to get started. We're starting to script some more screencasts to show you how to suggest changes or additions to content. We've also been planning improvements to our data portability story: our commitment to open access dictates that we make it easy for you to export our complete content for external reuse elsewhere. Making specific plans for that is on the agenda for next month as well.

If you have questions, comments, or suggestions, please feel free to submit them as comments here. If you'd like to give Pleiades a spin, follow the instructions for requesting an account.

NEH Awards Grant for Pleiades Project

2010-03-31T15:54:00.001-04:00

I'm happy to report that the National Endowment for the Humanities, through the Humanities Collections and Reference Resources program of the Division of Preservation and Access, has granted New York University $298,457 in outright grant funds to support an additional three years of funding for the development of Pleiades. Watch this space, and Sean's blog, for further details in coming weeks. Here's the official NEH announcement (we're listed in the "Nebraska to Wyoming" PDF, page 7).

Our sincere thanks to NEH, the anonymous reviewers of our application, and to all those in our user community who have helped us reach this important milestone!

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this blog do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

A new Concordia term: "where" (needed for linking papyri to Pleiades resources)

2010-01-29T18:46:00.001-05:00

In discussions this week with Sean and Hugh, we explored what would be minimally necessary for web feeds describing the papyrological documents now being surfaced via http://papyri.info.

In the long term, we'd like to link not only to descriptive resources (at Pleiades or elsewhere) for their modern places of finding but also any ancient places attested in the texts themselves (having done named-entity analysis on all 50,000+ documents, the first steps in which are now underway by Mark Depauw and the Trismegistos team in Leiden).

In the near term, we can express geographic linkages on the basis of the nome attributions recorded for the papyri by the editors of the Heidelberger Gesamtverzeichnis der griechischen Papyrusurkunden Ägyptens whose records are incorporated into the papyri.info contents.

But none of the terms we had previously defined in our Concordia link-type thesaurus precisely fit this information. We did have several geographic terms (findSpot, origin, observedAt and attestsTo), but we needed to add a more generic one: "where". The nomes as indicated by HGV are geographical classifications, based on the ancient regions, made primarily for facilitating reference and review by modern scholars. They don't necessarily constitute "find spot" or "place of origin" in every case. This "where" term idea followed naturally from Sean's earlier efforts to advocate for a "where" link relation type. A link in a feed entry using this term will simply indicate that the described resource should be treated as being located, in a general way, at the place described by the linked resource.

Hopefully, this term will be useful not only for papyri.info, but also for other pre-existing datasets where the location information recorded about ancient artifacts is similarly less precise than the born-digital epigraphic corpora that guided the minting of our initial thesaurus terms. Hopefully it will also prove useful in contexts such as those that Sebastian has recently been blogging about.

Interoperation with Pleiades

2009-12-17T11:01:00.002-05:00

I've had a few questions lately about how other web-based publications could be designed to support interoperation with Pleiades. Here's my working advice:

Any project that wants to lay the groundwork for geographic interoperability on the basis of Pleiades should:

1. Capture and manage Pleiades identifiers (stable URLs like http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/638753/) for each place one might want to cite.

2. Request membership in the Pleiades community and add/modify content therein as necessary in order to create new resources (and new URLs) for places that Pleiades doesn't yet document, but which are provably historical and relevant to content controlled by the external project.

3. Capture and manage stable URLs from Wikipedia or GeoNames that correspond to modern geographic entities that are relevant to the content controlled by the external project. Don't conflate modern and ancient locations, as this will eventually lead to heartbreak.

4. Emit paged web feeds in the Atom Syndication Format (RFC 4287) that also conform to the guidance documented (with in-the-wild, third-party examples) at:

http://www.atlantides.org/trac/concordia/wiki/ConcordiaAtomFeeds

and make use of the terms defined at

http://www.atlantides.org/trac/concordia/wiki/ConcordiaThesaurus

to indicate publicly relationships such as "findspot" and "original location" between the content controlled by the external project, Pleiades resources, Wikipedia resources, GeoNames resources and resources published by other third parties.

5. Alert us so we can include the entry-point URL for the feeds in the seeded search horizon list for the web crawler and search index service we are developing.

You can see how the Epigraphic Databank Heidelberg team has been thinking about how to accomplish this at:

http://www.atlantides.org/trac/concordia/wiki/PleiadesMoI

and

http://www.atlantides.org/trac/concordia/wiki/EDHgeographyTable

Bridging Institutional Repository and Bibliographic Management

2009-11-19T10:27:00.003-05:00

As an institution, ISAW has an interest in disseminating, preserving and promoting the research products and publications of its faculty, research staff, students, affiliates and collaborators. Our parent institution, NYU, has made a commitment to the persistent dissemination of such materials when voluntarily contributed to its Faculty Digital Archive (FDA). We'll use the FDA as a locus for materials that fit well into DSpace (with which the FDA is realized) and that aren't rights-constrained. But we also need mechanisms for developing and publishing the whole bibliographic story of a particular faculty member, research group, project or conference with links from the individual entries to digital copies wherever they may be (e.g., the FDA, JSTOR, Internet Archive, Google Books). For this function, we like Zotero. Atop Zotero's robust and ubiquitous feed documents, we can build interoperability with our website and other tools and venues in a way that is also completely visible to commercial and third-party search and discovery tools.

There will be a number of iterations necessary to reach a fully robust solution, but we're already taking some of the first steps.

As an early experiment with the FDA, we had a student assistant input all of my boss's articles in PDF format, along with descriptive metadata (see: Roger Bagnall's Publications). The default metadata schema in the FDA wasn't a perfect fit for journal article citations, but the FDA staff is now working with us to extend the schema to meet our needs. We're using the Zotero data model as a guide.

Given that the metadata in this collection is the only structured dataset around for Roger's articles, I wanted to be able to get it all back out to use for other things. The FDA does provide web feeds, but (unlike Zotero) these aren't comprehensive for a given context and don't incorporate all the metadata fields. But we can use FDA's OAI-PMH interface to get the full metadata with a query like:

http://archive.nyu.edu/request?verb=ListRecords&metadataPrefix=oai_dc&set=hdl_2451_28115

where "hdl_2451_28115" is the identifier for the "Roger Bagnall's Publications" container I linked to above. (Special thanks to Ekaterina Pechekhonova on the NYU Digital Library team, who helped me with syntax).

As a further experiment, I wrote an XSL transform to convert the OAI-PMH XML document into the RDF XML Zotero can import. There are a couple of inelegant hacks in the transform (mainly to get at substrings within single fields), but I'm still happy with the results. The import into Zotero went smoothly:

http://www.zotero.org/paregorios/items/collection/1505597

Next steps: move this to a shared Zotero library so Roger, a student assistant and members of our digital projects team can collaborate to enter the rest of the publications (books, book sections, etc.) and fix any errors in the article records. Then we'll look at the process for using that metadata (via another transform) to help us populate the FDA. We'll also start working on parsing and aggregating Zotero's feeds for use on our website (in Roger's online profile and aggregated with other affiliates' feeds to provide a "recent publications" section).

We're also experimenting with Zotero for the bibliography of our Pleiades project (a collaborative online gazetteer of the Greek and Roman world), and as a component in a potential replacement for the Checklist of Editions of Greek, Latin, Demotic and Coptic Papyri, Ostraca and Tablets. On a more personal level, I've taken to doing all my bookmarking with Zotero and have set up a folder in my library (with associated feed) so that colleagues can following what I'm citing on a daily basis.

Determining BAtlas IDs for future Pleiades interoperation

2009-06-09T12:55:00.005-04:00

For those who are working with datasets they'd like eventually to link up with Pleiades, we created the Barrington Atlas ID scheme. I've just posted some more tools for helping you determine the BAtlas IDs to go with your existing geographic names or other information.

There's now a draft "Barrington Atlas Index with Identifiers". In PDF (watch out: 7.2 MB) it looks like:

It's also available in a 1.0 MB zip-compressed HTML version, with somewhat semantic class attributes on spans that could be used to parse out different themes ahead of an attempt to match it to a names list:

And of course there is already the home-brewed XML format we distributed the original IDs in (last release tar-gzipped archive):

Share and enjoy!

The Concordia Graph

2009-01-28T10:57:00.003-05:00

In yesterday's post, I should also have linked directly to the working copy of the Concordia Graph ... persons, places, names, objects and some basic, history-oriented relationships between them ... a subset of what hopefully GAWD will eventually address (as non-idiosyncratically as possible).