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.

Pelagios Project Plan Part 1: Aims, Objectives and Final Output(s) of the project

Overall aim

To trial a method of linking open data (LOD) that enables scholars and enthusiasts alike to discover and make use of references to ancient places in maps, texts, images and tables.

Objectives

1. Define a Core Ontology for Place References (COPR). In discussion with external groups, the project partners will develop a base-line ontology to help users answer two kinds of query:

i) Within this document (text, map, database), give me a list/map of all the ancient places in it.

ii) Given this place, give me a list of documents (texts, maps, databases) that reference it.

i.e. we’re looking for the simplest method for enabling users to say with confidence that the document they’re looking at refers to place x (or vice versa), and then to bring up additional sources of information about it.

2. Trial this ontology on different document types (text, map, database) related to ancient world research, where each partner:

i) Aligns place references in their own document types to Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places

ii) Generates Resource Description Framework (RDF) based on the ontology

iii) Documents that process so that it can be reproduced by others.

3. Create prototype tools and services, which are easily consumable by learners, educators, researchers and the public, to demonstrate the power and effectiveness of this approach.

i.e. answer the ‘so what?” question by demonstrating some of the things that users will be able to do with this resource.

Outputs

1. A publicly available, lightweight core ontology which can then by modified or extended by different users: i.e. the ontology will permit modular extensions for different kinds of document so that details specific to each type will not add unnecessary complexity for users wishing to publish data in conformance with the core ontology. The COPR ontology will be immediately accessible as RDF/XML on the Pleiades website.

2. Documentation of the processes by which each partner identifies place references and aligns those references to Pleiades. Drawing on the consortium’s breadth of experience, we will detail these processes as a guide for others looking to adopt a linked open geodata (LOG) approach: i.e. although we’re using URIs based on Pleiades, the ontology should be able to work with other gazetteers (including those based on modern placenames). Project partners will host instance RDF describing their holdings on their own websites or in established repositories such as the TALIS Connected Commons.

3. Development of open source web services and neo-geographic web tools. These technologies will optimize machine-access to the raw RDF and make both the discovery and visualization (by map, list or ordered ‘timeline’) of the integrated geodata simple for learners, teachers, researchers and the general public. All software Code will be made publicly available through an open repository (e.g. GitHub).