Category Archives: Pelagios

Fluffy dates and associated places

One of the conversations that it was really useful to hash out in person and with the involvement of so many experts and interested parties present at the workshop a couple weeks ago, was the question of how the SNAP:DRGN Cookbook should recommend contributing person-datasets represent date information.

It has been our working assumption that the minimalist information SNAP is ingesting would optionally include a single, undifferentiated, very crudely recorded date associated with  person. (By the same token, any place information associated with a person would be given only in very blunt form, inasmuch as it serves almost as an extra name, epithet or indentifier for a person. Further more granular place association, à la Pelagios, might be included in the original prosopography, and/or in the exposed RDF serialization of said dataset, but SNAP will only expect and take advantage of associated place in the most abstract form.) The argument may be at its clearest with respect to dating, however, partly because there are so many strong arguments for including more granular and semantic date information in a prosopographic dataset. Continue reading Fluffy dates and associated places

Pelagios and SNAP

SNAP is part of an ecology of interlocking Linked Open Data initiatives, sometimes referred to as the Graph of Ancient World Data (GAWD). A forthcoming special issue of ISAW papers gives a helpful overview of the breadth of this community and its interests. One of the strengths of this approach is that each project contributes to and benefits from activities elsewhere and thus the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. One of these projects, Pelagios, plays a complementary role to SNAP by connecting online documents to places, rather than people. Pelagios has now been running since February 2011 – this blog post provides a little background to it and perhaps even indicate possible future directions of travel for SNAP. Continue reading Pelagios and SNAP