Rainer SIMON | Leif ISAKSEN | Elton BARKER | Pau DE SOTO CAÑAMARES
(AIT Austrian Institute of Technology, Vienna, Austria)
Keywords: Linked Data, Integration, Annotation, Search, Visualization
Abstract:
Pelagios is a community initiative that facilitates better linkages between online resources documenting the past, based on the places they refer to. Initially focusing on the classical worlds of Greece and Rome, Pelagios has been working with a growing network of partners from the humanities and archaeology disciplines towards connecting different types of online resources – the literature of different periods and languages, archaeological databases, maps and other images, the results of scholarly research, etc. – so that they become more easily discoverable and seamlessly navigable for users.
Through Special Interest Groups (SIGs), Pelagios actively fosters the development of best practices, as well as the development and dissemination of openly licensed digital resources and software tools. Examples include the Pelagios conventions for publishing gazetteer metadata as Linked Open Data; the openly licensed base map tiles from the Digital Atlas of the Roman Empire (DARE); or software tools such as the “Recogito” document annotation platform, which aids the process of linking digital texts and maps to the places they refer to, and “Peripleo”, a prototype search interface for visualizing and navigating the growing pool of interconnected open data published collectively by the community. Pelagios recently launched the “Commons” (http://commons.pelagios.org), an online forum where practitioners from a range of institutions and fields are collaborating across a number of thematic (e.g. Archaeology, Ancient Greek, Roman, Medieval, Byzantine, Islamic, East Asian, Maritime) and technical SIGs (e.g. Gazetteers or “Linked Pasts” concerened with technical integration issues) to develop further the goals and assets of the initiative.
The poster will present the Pelagios initiative more generally; introduce our Special Interest Groups, key partners, and the community at large; and provide an overview of our digital resources and software projects including the DARE map tiles, Recogito and Peripleo.
