Presentation from the DH2014Geo workshop at Lausanne, July 8.

1. Pelagios 3
Towards a Graph of Ancient World Data &
an Ecosystem of Gazetteers
Elton Barker @eltonteb
The Open University
Rainer Simon @aboutgeo
Austrian Institute of Technology
Leif Isaksen @leifuss
University of Southampton
July 8, 2014, Lausanne, Switzerland

2. …or any other online resource that bears
a relation to a particular ancient place!
Inscriptions
Texts
Archaeological
Finds
Museum
Objects
Archaeological
Sites
Pelagios | Linking Data, Openly
39 partners from 6 countries
ca. 830.000+ annotations

3. 3
A Brief History of Pelagios | Pelagios 1 & 2

4. How? | Don’t Unify the Model – Annotate!

5. 5
Ancient World
Resources
Pleiades
Gazetteer
Pelagios

6. 6
A Brief History of Pelagios | Pelagios 3
 2 year project (Sep 2013 – Aug 2015)
 Funded by Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
 Annotation of geographic documents
predating 1492 (maps and texts)
Traditions
 Latin
 Greek & Byzantine
 Portolan charts & portolanos
 Christian Tradition
 Islamic Tradition
 Chinese Tradition

7. 7
by Romana Klee CC BY-SA 2.0
Growing the Graph | #1 Annotation
Associating Documents with Places.

8. 810.12.2009
Growing the Graph | Recogito Annotation Tool

9. 9
Growing the Graph | #2 Linking Gazetteers
pleiades:423025
dare:1438
trismegistos:2058
wikidata:Q3094657
dai:2090320
Associating Places with Places (in different gazetteers).

10. 10
China Historical GIS
…

11. 11
Connecting Gazetteers
 Pelagios is a gazetteer user
 Pelagios is not a maintainer or aggregator of gazetteers
 PS: Should we unify rather than align? We don‘t think so!
Good reasons for diversity! Coverage, granularity, focus, scholarly
quality, community, …
 Pelagios 3 defined an RDF profile (or »specification«) for
1. publishing links between places in different gazetteers online
2. publishing minimal place metadata online
So that we search at all!
So that we can make
connections and cross-search.

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15. 15

16. 16
PLACES
INDEX
ITEMS
DB
PELAGIOS API
INGEST & ADMINISTRATION
 »indexed units«
are place groups
 Unified fulltext search
across both indices
 Fuzzy search support
 Spatial indexing
 Facet support
 Items
(referencing places)
 Datasets
(containing items)
 Annotations
(building the links)
 Various aggregation
and lookup tables
(to speed things up)RDF
»Pelagios Annotations«
RDF
Gazetteer Metadata
JSON(P) + CORS HTML

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18. 18
API
 Keyword search
 Items in dataset, sub-items in item
 Places per dataset, per item
 Temporal profile of dataset
 Subsets in dataset
 closeMatch-network for place
 Datasets per place (with or without closeMatches)
WORK IN PROGRESS!

19. 19
Q & A
http://pelagios-project.blogspot.co.uk
@Pelagiosproject