The *Child of 10* standard

While Pelagios has been largely about building an alliance of leading ancient world research groups with the aim of linking their data in an open and transparent way, the 'front end' of our product has never been far from our minds. After all, many of the partners are also users of the data that they gather, or, if not the actual users, they have their own user groups to think about and appeal to. As a classicist myself - that is, as someone who spends most of the time reading and analysing ancient Greek texts - I want to be able to access sources easily and trust the data that I get: in other words, I want to be able to turn on the tap and find that the water runs (either hot or cold, depending on what I'm doing); I'm not interested in the plumbing that brings the water to me.

So it is with timely fashion that JISC brought to our attention a fellow jiscGEO project, called G3. In an earlier post, they had talked about a useful benchmark in user interface design being the Child of 10 standard, meaning that a child of 10 should be able to learn to do something useful with the system within 10 minutes. This indicates whether a system is “easy to use” or not.

Will our tool, the Pelagios Graph Explorer, fit the bill, I wonder? While our natural target audience are university researchers (lecturers and undergrads), given the seemingly never-ending appeal of Classics in popular culture, we would be mad not to take seriously the point that a 10 year old should be able to use our tool to find out interesting stuff about the ancient world. Indeed, the technical skills of the average Classicist researcher - not least this one - makes it imperative that we address this question. At the time of writing, then, we are currently engaging in user testing of the Graph Explorer with a sample representative audience, the results from which we will help inform our delivery of the product at the end of October (though it's already clear that this will be a work-in-progress...). All next week Mia Ridge, who has been conducting the user testing, will blog about it, setting out the methods (why we chose them, what prep is done), what actually happens in a session, and then some initial results.

But I can give a sneak preview here of the answer to that question, does the Pelagios Graph Explorer pass the *child of 10* test. On current performance, that would be a 'no'. Which is not to say that things haven't gone well! On the contrary, the very fact that issues are being raised with what you can do now that stuff is linked shows how successful we've been in linking our data: when we started out, it simply wasn't possible to imagine an ancient world of linked data, let alone think seriously about traversing it. But now that we have linked stuff together, the bar has been raised and people - rightly - want to do more with it. This presents a challenge to all the Pelagios partners to provide as much detail as possible in their metadata, in order to allow the kind of free play that a 10 year old - or a classicist - might want.

Perhaps we could start with the name: the Pelagios Graph Explorer isn't very sexy. Suggestions on the back of a postcard, or, ideally, on this blog, welcome.

Welcome to PELAGIOS

PELAGIOS stands for 'Pelagios: Enable Linked Ancient Geodata In Open Systems'. The idea behind the project is simple, even if the actions to fulfill it - and the acronym - are not. On-line resources that reference ancient places are multiplying rapidly, bringing huge potential for the researcher provided that they can be found; but, even then, the user currently has no way of bringing the data together. PELAGIOS has teamed up with an international consortium of leading research groups to trial a method of linking open data (LOD) that will enable scholars and enthusiast alike to discover all kinds of stuff related to ancient places and then to visualize it in accessible and meaningful ways.

The consortium of projects and research groups that make up PELAGIOS are as follows:

• Google Ancient Places (Open University, University of Southampton)
• LUCERO (The Open University)
• Pleiades (Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, NYU)
• Perseus Digital Library (Tufts University)
• Arachne (University of Cologne)
• SPQR (King's College, London)
• Digital Memory Engineering (Austrian Institute of Technology)
• Open Context (UC Berkeley)

We'll be aiming to post the project's many turns pretty regularly (say, every other week or so), since we believe that the process as much as any outcome itself may be of interest to the community. Above all, since a project of this size and nature will only succeed if it has the input from those who are going to use it as a resource (i.e. you guys), we welcome your feedback. So join us in going places, ancient style.

Pelagios is funded by JISC as part of their #jiscGEO programme.