Fasti Online - Pelagios Compliant and viewable in the New API

We have some good news from Fasti-Online HQ, we are now Pelagios-compliant and are the first dataset (along with the Ure Museum) to be viewable in the new Pelagios API! Very exciting!

Trebula Mutuesca in the new Pelagios API v2 - showing the Fasti sites

The Fasti representations can be seen at:

Fasti Online in Pelagios

Fasti Online Annotations in Pelagios

Please note that this is using the cutting edge code (version 2 of the API) which is currently in a pre-release state and so may be down or a bit buggy - but it's great to be able to give a preview! A blog post will be coming soon introducing the v2 API, so watch this space!

How did we get there?

Firstly, with a lot of help from the Pelagios team! This was our first foray into the world of Linked Data, so we had quite a few queries initially, but once they were ironed out the process of creating the relevant files was relatively painless.

Linking the Pleiades URIs

Fasti is a database of archaeological excavations all of which by their very definition happen at a place. So our first step was to match the place information in Fasti with the placenames in Pleiades, which acts as the glue between the Pelagios partners. I have mentioned the process we undertook to do this in a previous entry. We ended up with 339 Fasti sites that link to a Pleiades URI, we hope to improve on this number in the future.

Creating the RDF representation

We then had to create the RDF representation of our data, which can be seen here. Our RDF is relatively simple, in that we just have the Fasti excavation name, followed by the Pleiades URI and the URI to the excavation record in Fasti. A typical entry looks like this:

<http://www.fastionline.org#set1/annotation1> <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#type> <http://www.openannotation.org/ns/Annotation> .
<http://www.fastionline.org#set1/annotation1> <http://purl.org/dc/terms/title> "Pompeii, house VI 8, 20-21.2" .
<http://www.fastionline.org#set1/annotation1> <http://www.openannotation.org/ns/hasBody> <http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/433032#this> .
<http://www.fastionline.org#set1/annotation1> <http://www.openannotation.org/ns/hasTarget> <http://www.fastionline.org/micro_view.php?item_key=fst_cd&fst_cd=AIAC_1704> .

Of course this file is created programmatically within Fasti's Archaeological Recording Kit (ARK) back-end. ARK is an open-source project, meaning that the codebase can be easily updated and those updates rolled out to all users of the system. This is a plus for us, because it has meant that we only needed to write a few new lines of code into the ARK codebase to output the Fasti dataset in a Pelagios-compliant format. The real beauty is that now the code has been written and committed back to the ARK codebase any other project using ARK (providing they can meaningfully match to Pleiades URIs) can immediately become Pelagios-compliant with the click of a button - very cool, and it bodes well for new partners in the future!

The VoID file

We also had to create a VoID file, essentially a machine-readable description of the RDF dataset. This was a little bit technical to look at, but thanks to a number of templates provided by the team we just replaced the relevant bits with Fasti-specific information and were good to go. Our VoID file can be found here, if you are using a similar set-up to us then it should just be a matter of replacing the Fasti-specific stuff with your own dataset details.

What's next?

Now that we have the code all cleaned, we will automate the creation of the .n3 file (the RDF representation), so that when a new site is added into Fasti it will automatically update the .n3 file - providing near live data to Pelagios partners. We are also looking forward to the other partners getting their data into the new API so we can start playing around with using the linked data on Fasti (and within other ARKs). We are just entering the fun part of a project like this - after all no one likes crunching their data to fit, but now it is in the right format we can really start using it for advancing the research in the field and learning new things about what we are interested in, archaeology, and not the ins and outs of arcane RDF notation!

This has also come at exactly the right time for the Fasti project as we are gearing up to release the new version of the front-end in the next couple of months, and the Pelagios linkages will become a big part of this overhaul. Fasti's future is bright... Fasti's future is Linked!

FASTI Online - New Project Partner

As Fasti Online is one of the newest Pelagios partners, I thought it was about time we introduced ourselves to the project and let everyone know why we have joined and what we are hoping to bring to the table, and also what we hope to gain from Pelagios ourselves.

Between 1946 and 1987 the International Association for Classical Archaeology (AIAC) published the Fasti Archaeologici. It contained very useful summary notices of excavations throughout the area of the Roman Empire. However, spiraling costs and publication delays combined to render it less and less useful. AIAC's board of directors thus decided in 1998 to discontinue the publication and to seek a new way of recording and diffusing new results. The Fasti Online is the result of this effort.

Working with L - P : Archaeology [creators of the Archaeological Recording Kit (ARK)] AIAC and our project partners[1] have created an online database of over 2,700 archaeological sites in 13 different countries[2]. Each of these sites has had at least one excavation season since the year 2000 (in fact we have over 4000 excavation seasons in the database). Fasti Online, therefore, is a database of ongoing and recent archaeological projects, and not really a database of ancient places. This is what has made Pelagios so interesting to us, as by linking to the data provided by the other partners we can enrich our own and hopefully enrich theirs as well.

As to how we are planning on making the linkages, one of the fields recorded by the Fasti partners is the Ancient Site Name (where available). For the first round of linking we plan on matching our Ancient Site Names with those held in Pleiades, doing a check on the coordinates to make sure that they are the same place and then adding the Pleiades URI to the Fasti database. An initial run of the linking code has left us with 355 sites that match with Pleiades sites (only 955 of the Fasti sites have an Ancient Site Name attached) so that is not too bad at all for a first run.

We hope that at some point in the future we may be able to supply some of our Ancient site names back to Pleiades and of course the Pelagios partners should be able to link to the Fasti database to see if there are any ongoing excavations in their area of interest!

We'll write a further post once the linking script has been run, and we have managed to get an RDF representation of it all. Watch this space!

[1] the project is generously supported by the Packard Humanities Institute, while the Italian and Ukrainian sites receive additional support from the Ministero dei Beni e le Attivita' Culturali and the Ukrainian Studies Fund, respectively.

[2] the countries that are currently part of Fasti are Italy, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Macedonia, Malta, Morocco, Croatia, Albania, Slovenia, Kosovo, Montenegro and Ukraine

Pelagios Phase 2: Project Plan

Phase two of Pelagios looks to build on our lightweight framework, based on the concept of place (a Pleiades URI) and a standard ontology (Open Annotation Collaboration), by publishing the Pelagios Toolkit-a set of services and documentation that will assist people in annotating, discovering and vizualizing references to places in open online ancient world resources.

In all, there are four Work-Packages:

§ WP1 casts the net beyond the existing partners in order to allow anyone to publish their data in a way that maximizes its discoverability. This webcrawling and indexing service will find material and - based on the Pelagios framwork and semantic sitemaps - aggregate place metadata in order to create value for the holders of that data.

§ WP2 aims to explore further ways of exploiting the concept of place. The place/space-based APIs and contextualisation service will help other users and data-providers discover relevant data and do interesting things with them.

§ WP3 tackles end-user engagement: i.e. subject specialists who lack the technical coding expertise to use the data underlying what it seen on the screen. The visualization service will explore ways of allowing these users to get to grips with the data both in a single Pelagios interface but also as embedded widgets hosted on each partner’s site.

§ WP4 distils the guidelines into a cookbook providing explicit recipes for producing, finding and making use of geoannotations for the community as a whole. In short, you won’t need to be a Pelagios partner to be able to join-in in making your data discoverable and usable.

The evolving nature of the Pelagios collective reflects the shift towards community engagement. While partners from the original Pelagios proof-of-concept project will continue to be involved, the main work for phase two of Pelagios will be carried out by: Arachne, CLAROS, DME, Fasti-online, GAP, IET (the Open University), Nomisma, Southampton, SPQR, the Ure Museum.

Deliverables

The outcomes, in more detail, are as follows:

D 1.1: Web Crawling and Indexing Prototype. This infrastructure component traverses resource sets on the Web (registered manually or discovered using semantic search engines like Sindice) and catalogues their place metadata. Place metadata encompasses geographical coordinates as well as Pleiades and Geonames URIs.

D 1.2: Pelagios 2 Graph API. This deliverable is an HTTP API that allows querying of the aggregate data graph generated by the Indexing Prototype. The API will provide responses in JSON and RDF format; and possibly in additional formats (e.g. KML or GeoRSS) if the need is identified in WP3. The initial range of possible queries is based on the outcome of the Pelagios project. The exact scope and structure of the final API will be driven by the requirements identified in WP3.

D 1.3: API Statistics and Reporting Interface. This deliverable will extend the Pelagios 2 Indexing Prototype with means to extract statistics and reports on the use of the API. Data partners can use this interface to gain insight into how their data is being discovered, queried and re-used within the larger online community.

D 2.1: Place-based API. This deliverable will extend the Pelagios 2 API with queries that return resources relevant to specific places or those with mereological (part-whole) relationships.

D 2.2: Space-based API. This deliverable will extend the Pelagios 2 API with queries that permit searches based on geographic scope, e.g. within a certain geographic buffer around a given location set.

D 2.3: Contextualisation Prototype. This deliverable is a service that provides ranked, relevant materials for a certain place or particular Named Entities. Results will be enriched with additional data from sources such as GeoNames, DBpedia and Freebase.

D 3.1: Evaluation of User Needs. This deliverable will report on the results of a formal evaluation of user needs regarding data visualization. The evaluation will be conducted in conjunction with project partners, and will inform the design of a set of online visualization widgets. This deliverable will have the form of a series of blog posts.

D 3.2: Widget Suite, Alpha version. This deliverable encompasses the first (alpha) version of the visualization widgets.

D 3.3: Evaluation of Widget Design. This deliverable will report on the results of observational and participatory design studies. The studies will be conducted on the Widgets as they are continuously and iteratively being developed from alpha state to final (beta) prototype. This deliverable will have the form of a series of blog posts.

D 3.4: Widget Suite, Beta version. This deliverable encompasses the final (beta) version of the visualization widgets.

D 4: Pelagios 2 Cookbook. Content Partners will produce regular documentation on data preparation, practices, tool use, etc. in the form of blog posts. The PI, assisted by the Co-Is will distil this information into a “cookbook” which will make it easier for anyone with Ancient World content to publish their data online in conformance with the Pelagios 2 common open standards.