skip to main content
10.1145/2615569.2615693acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PageswebsciConference Proceedingsconference-collections
short-paper

Pelagios and the emerging graph of ancient world data

Published: 23 June 2014 Publication History

Abstract

This paper discusses an emerging cloud of Linked Open Data in the humanities sometimes referred to as the Graph of Ancient World Data (GAWD). It provides historical background to the domain, before gong on to describe the open and decentralised characteristics which have partially characterised its development. This is done principally through the lens of Pelagios, a collaborative initiative led by the authors which connects online historical resources based on common references to places. The benefits and limitations of the approach are evaluated, in particular its low barrier to entry, open architecture and restricted scope. The paper concludes with a number of suggestion for encouraging the adoption of Linked Open Data within other humanities communities and beyond.

References

[1]
M. Addis, M. Boniface, S. Goodall, P. Grimwood, S. Kim, P. Lewis, K. Martinez, and A. Stevenson. SCULPTEUR: Towards a New Paradigm for Multimedia Museum Information Handling. pages 582--596. 2003.
[2]
E. Barker. Welcome to PELAGIOS, Feb. 2011.
[3]
C. Blackwell and N. Smith. A Brief Guide to the Canonical Text Service. Technical report, Homer Multitext Project, May 2013.
[4]
G. Crane. The Perseus Project and Beyond: How Building a Digital Library Challenges the Humanities and Technology. D-Lib Magazine, Jan. 1998.
[5]
N. Crofts, M. Doerr, T. Gill, S. Stead, and M. Stiff. Definition of the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model. Version 5. Technical report, ICOM, Jan. 2011.
[6]
T. Elliott, S. Heath, and J. Muccigrosso, editors. Current Practice in Linked Open Data for the Ancient World, volume 7 of ISAW Papers. Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York, 2014.
[7]
B. Fuchs, L. Isaksen, and A. C. Smith. The Virtual Lightbox for Museums and Archives: A Portlet Solution for Structured Data Reuse Across Distributed Visual Resources. In Museums and the Web 2005, Victoria, 2005. Archives & Museum Informatics.
[8]
L. Isaksen. Archaeology and the Semantic Web. PhD thesis, University of Southampton, 2011.
[9]
E. Kansa. Openness and Archaeology's Information Ecosystem. World Archaeology, 44(4):498--520, 2012.
[10]
A. Meadows and E. Gruber. Coinage and Numismatic Methods. A Case Study of Linking a Discipline. ISAW Papers, (7), 2014.
[11]
D. Myers, Y. Avramides, and A. Dalgity. Changing the Heritage Inventory Paradigm: The Arches Open Source System. Conservation Perspectives: the GCI Newsletter, pages 4--9, 2013.
[12]
S. Rahtz, W. Hall, and T. Allen. The Development of Dynamic Archaeological Publications. In S. Rahtz and P. Reilly, editors, Archaeology in the Information Age. Routledge, 1992.
[13]
R. Robineau. Graph of Ancient World Data, June 2012.
[14]
R. Sanderson, P. Ciccarese, and V. d. S. Herbert. Open Annotation Data Model. Technical report, W3C, Feb. 2013.
[15]
R. J. A. Talbert. Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2000.

Cited By

View all
  • (2025)Cliopatria - A geospatial database of world-wide political entities from 3400BCE to 2024CEScientific Data10.1038/s41597-025-04516-912:1Online publication date: 12-Feb-2025
  • (2024)Joined up Thinking: Aggregating archaeological datasets at an international scaleInternet Archaeology10.11141/ia.64.3Online publication date: Nov-2024
  • (2023)Pensamiento Integrado: Agregación de conjuntos de datos arqueológicos a escala internacionalRevista del Museo de Antropología10.31048/1852.4826.v16.n2.42861(451-470)Online publication date: 28-Dec-2023
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. Pelagios and the emerging graph of ancient world data

      Recommendations

      Comments

      Information & Contributors

      Information

      Published In

      cover image ACM Conferences
      WebSci '14: Proceedings of the 2014 ACM conference on Web science
      June 2014
      318 pages
      ISBN:9781450326223
      DOI:10.1145/2615569
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

      Sponsors

      Publisher

      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      Published: 23 June 2014

      Permissions

      Request permissions for this article.

      Check for updates

      Author Tags

      1. geospatial
      2. humanities
      3. linked open data

      Qualifiers

      • Short-paper

      Conference

      WebSci '14
      Sponsor:
      WebSci '14: ACM Web Science Conference
      June 23 - 26, 2014
      Indiana, Bloomington, USA

      Acceptance Rates

      WebSci '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 29 of 144 submissions, 20%;
      Overall Acceptance Rate 245 of 933 submissions, 26%

      Contributors

      Other Metrics

      Bibliometrics & Citations

      Bibliometrics

      Article Metrics

      • Downloads (Last 12 months)12
      • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)4
      Reflects downloads up to 17 Feb 2025

      Other Metrics

      Citations

      Cited By

      View all
      • (2025)Cliopatria - A geospatial database of world-wide political entities from 3400BCE to 2024CEScientific Data10.1038/s41597-025-04516-912:1Online publication date: 12-Feb-2025
      • (2024)Joined up Thinking: Aggregating archaeological datasets at an international scaleInternet Archaeology10.11141/ia.64.3Online publication date: Nov-2024
      • (2023)Pensamiento Integrado: Agregación de conjuntos de datos arqueológicos a escala internacionalRevista del Museo de Antropología10.31048/1852.4826.v16.n2.42861(451-470)Online publication date: 28-Dec-2023
      • (2023)MetaFraming: A Methodology for Democratizing Heritage Interpretation Through Wiki SurveysProceedings of the 20th International Conference on Culture and Computer Science: Code and Materiality10.1145/3623462.3623465(1-9)Online publication date: 28-Sep-2023
      • (2023)Linked Data NetworksThe Oxford Handbook of Archaeological Network Research10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198854265.013.22(378-391)Online publication date: 20-Nov-2023
      • (2022)Datos enlazados para el análisis de la literatura grecolatinaRevista Española de Documentación Científica10.3989/redc.2022.1.184245:1(e316)Online publication date: 31-Jan-2022
      • (2022)When linguistics meets web technologies. Recent advances in modelling linguistic linked dataSemantic Web10.3233/SW-22285913:6(987-1050)Online publication date: 26-Sep-2022
      • (2022)LL(O)D and NLP perspectives on semantic change for humanities researchSemantic Web10.3233/SW-22284813:6(1051-1080)Online publication date: 26-Sep-2022
      • (2022)Culture knowledge graph construction techniquesEducation for Information10.3233/EFI-22002838:3(233-264)Online publication date: 2-Sep-2022
      • (2022)Linked Data for the Historic EnvironmentInternet Archaeology10.11141/ia.59.7Online publication date: Jul-2022
      • Show More Cited By

      View Options

      Login options

      View options

      PDF

      View or Download as a PDF file.

      PDF

      eReader

      View online with eReader.

      eReader

      Figures

      Tables

      Media

      Share

      Share

      Share this Publication link

      Share on social media