How do we balance supporting novice spatial users alongside experts? Or, is geospatial analysis necessarily GIS?

The task for table 5 at the #jiscGEO breakout discussion was to come up with a recommendation about how to balance the needs of newcomers to geospatial analysis with those of ‘experts’ in using Geographical Information Systems (GIS). To have greatest impact and value for the community, there was general agreement that any strategy should address the needs of the subject specialist user community. This means exploring how the technology can be made to work for the user, rather than necessarily ‘up skilling’ the user to become a technical expert (say, in GIS).

By focusing simply on technology training, there is the danger that, as well as being seen as irrelevant, too difficult or simply just boring for users (academics or students), the data gets overlooked or is made to fit a ‘system’ of analysis. For example, one problem of using GIS in humanities is the issue of ‘fuzzy’ data. This isn’t just a case of the system failing to cope with fuzziness: it also betrays an underlying assumption that data can, and should be, disambiguated and clear. For humanists, however, the questions driving research are often precisely those that look to nuance or complicate the material. We like messy results. Humanists need worry less about producing an accurate and/or truthful representation and more about how maps can be used as entry points to explore the data—this is seeing maps as part of the investigative process rather than as an end in and of themselves.

Ideally, then, users should be involved in the development, enrichment and adaptation of geospatial technologies, to make those tools work for them. Therefore, we recommend that JISC should build on their contacts within the HE sector to have teams of subject specialist users (i.e. the successful projects) go into universities, where this is already a JISC presence to help co-ordination, to show the target group the kinds of geospatial technologies that can be used and get them involved in shaping these tools for the future—the ‘show and tell’ unconference rolled out across the sector, as it were.

Elton, Nicola, Rasmus, Claire, Ryan, Addy

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.

Open Licenses

One of the most important things for any online resource to think about is the license they will make their data available under. Naturally we're very much into the Open variety here at Pelagios (in fact our work would essentially be meaningless otherwise), but that word can mask a good degree of philosophical (and occasionally bureaucratic) diversity. Creative Commons have a done a remarkable job of trying to simplify this process but it remains a fact that when bringing different datasets together we may be faced with the need to deal with multiple licenses. Pelagios in fact uses four: CC-ZERO, CC-BY, CC-BY-SA, CC-NC-ND. There are two reasons for this, a pragmatic one and a philosophical one.

Pragmatically, we essentially have no choice when working with a sizeable (and growing) consortium. Many of the projects we are working have been established for years (occasionally decades) and although all subscribe to a policy of open content they have different needs and histories of licensing. There is simply no way for us to require that they change to a new licensing regime. Philosophically however we see this as no bad thing. Indeed, the purpose of Pelagios is not to serve up a new aggregation of content under a new license and we doubt whether such an imperative could ever be scalable in principle. Rather, we wish explore complementary ways that resource providers can make their content available that facilitate integration with third parties, but under their own license terms. Resource combinations should always be created with specific goals in mind - not simply ad hoc aggregations - that take into account the licensing requirements as well as the content.

We are aware that in some cases the desired data will not always be available under the terms and conditions one might wish but that is simply the nature of cultural content. Trying to force the issue will only make potential future partners more hesitant to collaborate. We are keen to work together with any provider with ancient data, just as long as they are truly interested in sharing what they have with the wider world.

Information about all the licenses we use is available at:
http://pelagios-project.blogspot.com/2011/03/pelagios-project-plan-part-4-ipr.html

The Other 15/10 Geo Projects

Pelagios is funded by JISC under the GECO (Geospatial Engagement and Community Outreach) activity. In all #jiscGEO has some twelve "15/10" geo projects, whose common overall aims include increasing the use of geospatial tools, establishing a trajectory for embedding geospatial resources within a research and learning environment, and promoting best practice (particularly interoperability) for transferring knowledge from specialist to user. Subjects range from working with trainee science teachers or monitoring the spread of moths with a smart phone app to making use of geospatial tools for solving real world problems and visualizing urban energy reduction. Pelagios is proud to be associated with these efforts and hopes that its work can help contribute to GECO’s overarching purpose to foster communities of users of geospatial resources (data, services and support).

For more information about these projects, please go to: geco.blogs.edina.ac.uk

Tagging Places on Old Maps: The DME Scenario

Following the productive Pelagios workshop at KCL, we (DME) have been busy tweaking our infrastructure to interoperate according to the "Pelagios Principles".

For DME, the situation is slightly different than for Pelagios' other data partners: First, our existing data model is already based on OAC - which does probably make our transition somewhat easier. Second, instead of owning an extensive existing data set, our "asset" is an end-user toolkit for manual annotation and semantic tagging of multimedia content (affectionately referred to as YUMA - the YUMA Universal Multimedia Annotator).

Tagging Maps with Pleiades References

In other words: instead of mapping existing place references in our data to URIs in the Pleiades namespace, our primary task was to modify YUMA in such a way that users can, from now on, tag media items with references to Pleiades places!

This has turned out to be quite straightforward: The simplest way by which users can add semantic tags to their annotations in YUMA is through an auto-completion textbox: As the user starts typing, available tags will appear in a drop-down box underneath the typed text. (The screenshot above shows this for the 'Corsica' example mentioned in an earlier post by Mathieu.)

Making Pleiades place references available as tags in YUMA involved two steps:

• First, we needed to incorporate a list of Pleiades place names (and their URIs) into our Tag Server. The Tag Server is the component which hosts tag vocabularies and provides the tag suggestions for the auto-completion hints. We got a Pleiades CSV data dump, from which we built an index using Apache Lucene, and set up the index as an additional tag source.
• Second, we needed to provide a 'Pelagios' view on our internal data to the outside world. The reason for this is that our existing RDF representation (although based on OAC) is close, but not identical to the Pelagios model. We therefore set up an alternative RDF output channel, mapped to a .pelagios suffix. Appending this suffix to the annotation URI will return Pelagios-compatible annotations, in either RDF/XML, N3 or Turtle notation based on content negotiation.

The 'Corsica' annotation, for example, is available at this URI: 

http://dme.ait.ac.at/yuma-server/api/annotation/618.pelagios

It will resolve to the following RDF (abbreviated for better readability, key parts red):

@prefix oac: <http://www.openannotation.org/ns/> .

<http://dme.ait.ac.at/samples/maps/oenb/AC04248667.tif>
   a  oac:Target .

<http://dme.ait.ac.at/yuma-server/api/annotation/618>
   a  oac:Annotation ;
   <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/creator>
      "rsimon" ;
   <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/title>
      "Corsica" ;
   <http://purl.org/dc/terms/created>
      "2011-04-11 11:12:34.295" ;
   <http://purl.org/dc/terms/modified>
      "2011-04-11 11:12:55.747" ;
   oac:hasBody
      <http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/991339> ;
   oac:hasTarget
      <http://dme.ait.ac.at/yuma-server/api/annotation/618#target> .
<http://dme.ait.ac.at/yuma-server/api/annotation/618#target>
   a  oac:ConstrainedTarget ;
   oac:constrainedBy
      <http://dme.ait.ac.at/yuma-server/api/annotation/618#ct> ;
   oac:constrains
      <http://dme.ait.ac.at/samples/maps/oenb/AC04248667.tif> .

Lessons Learned

Two concluding remarks: first, I would eventually like to see our 'YUMA OAC representation' unified with the Pelagios one. This is currently hindered a bit by the way the OAC model is organized (i.e. with only one body per annotation allowed, and no official specification on structured bodies). Right now, the difference is therefore that our oac:Body is a separate node that includes all elements that comprise the user's annotation (title, text body, multiple tags, etc.), whereas in Pelagios we consider the Pleiades reference to be the oac:Body directly. (For comparison, the YUMA OAC representation of the example above is here.)

Second, one of the benefits that we gain for YUMA from linking annotations to Linked Data resources is that we can get extra context information by dereferencing them. For example: if we link to DBpedia we can get things such as labels in different languages or alternative spellings for person names. This, in turn, provides us with a very lightweight mechanism for including (at least limited) multilingual and synonym search functionality in our system. (There's a video screencast demonstrating this here.) With our Pleiades integration, we don't quite get this yet: What's still missing is a mapping between Pleiades URIs and matching resources from e.g. Geonames or DBpedia where possible. (However, Pleiades+ might be just the way to address this I guess!)

Pelagios Project Plan Part 7: Budget

Budget forecast*

• Total Staffing costs 59%
• Partner collaboration activities (incl. the workshop) 16%
• Overheads (Estates and Indirects) 27%

*This is the total budget, including contributions In Kind from partners (see below)

Budget Management

The Arts Faculty Research Grants Manager is Suzanne Duncanson-Hunter. She is working closely with both the PI and CoI to make sure that the project keeps to budget. The PI and CoI are also in close correspondence with the JISC manager over how best to manage costs and utilise resources. In addition, the Open University, through Suzanne's efforts, have already drawn up an external consultancy contract with Rainer Simon of DME for work to be undertaken on Pelagios in WP3.

Budget Justification

The ontology work undertaken by LUCERO in WP1 complements the funding that they already have from JISC. Furthermore, all work on ontology specification, mapping and alignment done by the data and documentation partners (GAP, Perseus, DME, SPQR, Arachne) and Pleiades is payment In Kind. Because all of our partners are already committed to linked open data research and have secured sustainable and significant funding for themselves, Pelagios is able to make substantial research and infrastructural advances on a relatively modest budget, thus greatly maximizing Return On Investment for both JISC and project partners.

This is encapsulated by our 'start-up' event, the one-day workshop at KCL, which presents a unique opportunity for an intensive exchange of knowledge and experience on Linked Open GeoData from the community at large, as well as from all of our partners. For this reason we are intending to record the proceedings to help document the discussion of issues and methods relating to linking open data ontologies, so that it may be of use for other groups working in this area in the future. Our budget ensures that all invited external expert speakers will have UK costs borne, while also paying for the time and expenses of all the Pelagios partners, for both their participation at the workshop and the project meeting on the following day.

Pelagios Project Plan Part 6: Projected Timeline, Workplan & Overall Project Methodology

Project plan

Pelagios is divided into three work packages (WP), centred on the three stated outputs of the project: core ontology development; application of that ontology to the project partners’ sample datasets, and documentation of the process; and development of web resources to trial and show the value of the ontology for users.

WP1 Ontology Specification - LUCERO, Southampton ACRG, Pleiades

WP1 has three key elements:

1. First, to develop a core ontology for (ancient) place references (COPR) with help from the partners. This involves:

· Gathering from the project partners sample dataset ontologies that describe references to places in their documents, identifying common elements, and evaluating their robustness

· Constructing a core ontology that can be applicable for all the different datasets represented by the partners (text, database, map), and then testing its implementation with a SPARQL demonstrator

2. Second, to hold a two-day workshop on developing a core ontology for linking open geodata. This involves:

· Disseminating around the project partners and workshop invitees the proposed ontology as well as abstracts from all the speakers

· Hosting a one-day workshop that is open to all members of the community* with three sessions dedicated to: 1) Issues of referencing ancient and contemporary places online; 2) Lightweight ontology approaches; 3) Methods for generating, publishing and consuming compliant data. Each session will consist of several short (15 min) papers followed by half an hour of open discussion.

· Hosting a project meeting on the day following the workshop, which will be devoted to incorporating feedback from the community and then deciding upon the core pelagios ontology that will be used by each of the project partners

3. Lastly, to publish the COPR in RDF (hosted by Pleiades)

*For more information about the community workshop, including registration details, please visit: http://pelagios.eventbrite.com/

WP2 Documentation of Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI) Mapping and RDF publication - GAP, Perseus, SPQR, Arachne, DME

WP2 is divided into 5 parallel streams (A-E) according to the different document types hosted by each of the partners. Each stream will:

i) Detail the process by which local place references are aligned with Pleiades URIs and COPR-compliant RDF is generated and hosted

ii) Make recommendations for document-type extensions to COPR

· Stream A: GAP will document processes related to narrative free texts

· Stream B: Perseus will document processes related to XML-encoded freetext (In Kind)

· Stream C: SPQR will document processes related to fragmentary free texts

· Stream D: Arachne will document processes related to database records

· Stream E: DME will document processes related to rasterized maps

WP3 Development of Web services and tools to facilitate consumption - DME

This last WP trials and develops the various web-applications to which the ontology may be put. This includes:

· Developing a Representational State Transfer (REST) webservice to output COPR-compliant RDF in alternative output formats, e.g. Keyhole Markup Language (KML), GeoJSON

· Developing a suite of three web visualization tools: a map view, a table view, and an ‘ordered’ view (for chronological or narrative timelines)

· Incorporating further feedback from each partners’ user groups in order to permit agile development of the ontology webresources

The Pelagios GANTT chart (01 February 2011 – 31 October 2011)

Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct
WP1	WP1	WP1	WP2	WP2	WP2	WP2	WP2
	w/shop				WP3	WP3	WP3	WP3

Project Management

Most project meetings take place via skype:

· A monthly meeting comprising of the PI, Co-I and one representative from each of the partners is established for checking progress, identifying and resolving common issues, planning for the forthcoming month’s activities, ensuring aims are met, and disseminating the project outcomes.

· In the run-up to the workshop, a smaller group comprising of the PI, Co-I one representative from the development partners meet to discuss the ontology development.

· The PI and Co-I meet once a month with their JISC PM, David Flanders, to ensure that the project is on target.

The project uses a google group email for more regular, bi-weekly communication:

· This email group keeps partners informed of deadlines and to-dos.

· It also hosts discussion of work flows, issues and methodologies. All communication is archived for the benefit of the broader community.

In addition, the PI and Co-I will make one visit to each partner during the ontology application process. Rapid-iteration Agile methods will be used for software development.

Pelagios on Big Data

Recently JISC commissioned a reporter to go to the O'Reily Strata (Big Data) Conference in California. The report, which can be accessed here, throws up a number of interesting questions that are pertinent to our own project. We sketch out some initial responses here—but we’d welcome further comments from within the team or from any of our readers.

Given the opening questions asked about Big Data—What information is out there? How can we find it? And how can it be accessed?—it is perhaps no surprise to find that the Pelagios team is sympathetic to much of the discussion. From a brief reading of this document, three things strike us as being of particular relevance:

1. Open access. The concluding point, ‘if data is less open, it is less useful—limiting access limits value’, is one with which we are in total accord. The importance of data being open is particularly acute in an academic environment, where cutting edge research depends fundamentally on the ability to access datasets of all different kinds. If somewhat more geared towards a science model of research, nevertheless open access could transform (in a positive way) the Humanities, making it incumbent on the researcher to show his/her working out: just what is the evidence for this or that interpretation, and so on. But access is not the only issue; data must also be reusable—which presents its own range of technological and intellectual challenges. Furthermore, care must be given if we are to avoid a tyranny of openness, by virtue of which research that (for whatever reason) is less open (whatever that might mean) is passed over or fails to gain funding or prestige. Or, to put that differently, does the mere fact that something is open make it worthwhile research?

2. Infrastructure. This issue seemed to be the keynote of the blog. It is raised by (among others) Mike Olson (Cloudera), Rod Smith (IBM) and Abhishek Metha (Tresata); and by Steve Midgley (U.S. Department for Education). How do we find and identify valuable resources? And how can it be connected up? Just such an issue has been the concern too at the European Science Foundation (http://www.esf.org/research-areas/humanities/strategic-activities/research-infrastructures-in-the-humanities.html)—the practice to be guarded against being termed ‘data silos’. But, given the importance of ‘infrastructure to store and share data within sectors’, how can it be achieved? Various ‘top-down’ approaches (whether commercial or educational) have thus far fallen flat either because of insufficient user uptake or the lack of reusability of the data, tools, etc. Accordingly, Pelagios supports a ‘bottom-up’ Linked Data approach, by which a variety of user groups work together to connect their resources in an open and transparent way, which others can assess and to which they may add their own. We certainly support the idea that resources should be shared wherever possible and that research (particularly in the Humanities) needs to move beyond a narrow competitive mentality.

3. Users. This is something touched upon in our previous response and that is implied in much of the blog—but whose fundamental importance is not really addressed. Focus seems to be rather on the producers and how they can provide context for the data or an expert ability to disseminate knowledge and understanding. But what about the user-end of the communication (something which Humanities teaches us to pay attention to)? Who are the users? Why do they use some Big Data and not others? And how can they be empowered to bring together for themselves different kinds of information? This is the critical challenge facing anyone working in the digital medium. In a commercial context it is clear that there is increasing demand for ‘Data Scientists’ capable of making sense of it all. Arguably that has always been the role of academics, yet few of us have the requisite technical skills and domain knowledge demanded by these new resources. Pelagios is a consortium project for this very reason and we suspect that multidisciplinary research groups will, almost of necessity, be the organizational structure best suited to exploiting academic Big Data.

Pelagios Project Plan Part 4: IPR (Licensing for Content, Source Code and Data)

Update 8 July 2011: 

GAP now makes its place reference metadata available under a CC ZERO license:

http://googleancientplaces.wordpress.com/public-domain/

-----------------------

Pelagios will make its outputs publicly available under the following open licenses:

* The ontology will be put in the public domain under a CC 1.0 BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/1.0/) and hosted by the Pleiades Project

* Web services, tools and code will be made available under the European Union Public Licence - EUPL v.1.1 (http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/eupl) by DME

* Perseus’ contribution to Pelagios is entirely self-funded and therefore its IPR remains its own released under CC BY-SA (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/); it grants the right for its contributions in Work Packages 1, 2 and 3 to be published (non-exclusively) as part of the Pelagios project output

* GAP will publish Google Books’ place reference metadata that it generates (not including Google’s source metadata) under a CC BY licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/1.0/)

* Arachne publishes its datasets under a CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/)

* DME will publish sample COPR RDF under a CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/de/) based on public domain sources of rasterized maps (e.g. the Library of Congress Collection)

* SPQR publishes its datasets under (various) Creative Commons licenses (see under http://tinyurl.com/LDClassics for some examples)

Process documentation will emphasise Open Source software packages where possible.

Pelagios Project Plan Part 3: Risk Analysis and Success Plan

Risk Analysis

The main risks identified are shown below and will be reviewed every month:

Risk	Prob.	Impact	Action to Mitigate
Overly-complex or simplistic ontology inhibits uptake	Low	Med	The domain and technical expertise of LUCERO, ACRG and Pleiades, plus concrete use-cases from each partner, ensures a robust ontology. The use of modular extensions means that problems specific to one document type will not affect others, permitting multiple interest groups.
Lack of community interest	Low	Med	Each project partner already comes to the table with an established community of users, among whom the Pelagios outputs will be rolled out. Other interest groups such as Google, Ordnance Survey, GeoNames, EDINA and the European Commission will be involved through participating at the workshop.
Project stream unable to fund mapping and publication of data	Med	Low	The global economic crisis threatens all academic funding, but the highly international nature of the consortium and low dependency across the Work Packages greatly spreads this risk.
Critical failure of Pleiades Project	Low	Med	Pleiades is a core element of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW)’s digital infrastructure with high level institutional support and long term funding. It will be possible to use URIs generated from the Princeton Encyclopaedia of Classical Sites as a fallback position if necessary.

Evaluation

The success of the core ontology for place references (COPR) and linked open geo-data (LOG) approach will be measured against each publication stream using SMART criteria:

Specific: The ability to map a given document type to i) persistent Pleiades URIs, and ii) COPR-compliant RDF (see project plan post 1)

Measurable: A comparison of the precision and recall of the linked open geo-data (LOG) against a benchmark manual mapping of a sample from the source material

Achievable: Each team will identify an appropriate corpus in terms of both complexity and volume to demonstrate the value of the ontology

Relevant: Publication streams will refer to ancient places centred on the Mediterranean (whence come the majority of ancient sources) and datasets likely to be of interest to a wide audience

Timely: Sample data will be available four months prior to the end of the project. Complete datasets will be available one month prior to the end of the project.

In addition, documenting the process of implementing the core ontology by each stream is a key output of WP2 (see project plan post 6) by which future requirements can be identified, while each partner group will trial and elicit feedback on the demonstration web services among their target user-groups.

Sustainability

The RDF ontology will be hosted by Pleiades, whose long-term strategy and funding ensures the stability of both the domain name and content. Instance data will be held by the relevant partners, each of whom have sustainability at the core of their funding and institutional commitments. All web services and tools will use Open Source technology and Open Standards so as to be freely available for adoption by third parties. Code will be hosted in a suitable repository such as SourceForge or GitHub. A demonstrator version of the software will be hosted on multiple websites maintained by the project partners.

Pelagios Project Plan Part 2: Wider Benefits of Pelagios to Sector & Achievements for Host Institution

Pelagios benefits a number of institutions and the wider community through its extensive network of collaborations:

1. Pelagios brings together three projects within major international universities to thrash out a core ontology for all users working with place reference data. They are:

• The Open University’s LUCERO (Linking University Content for Education and Research Online), a JISC-funded project that is all about making University wide resources available to everyone using linked open data (LOD)
• The Archaeological Computing Research Group of the University of Southampton, which involves archaeologists and computer scientists working together to develop Semantic Web data integration.
• Pleiades, a joint project of the Ancient World Mapping Center, the Stoa Consortium, and the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. Supported also by the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities, Pleiades is giving scholars, students, and enthusiasts worldwide the ability to use, create and share historical geographic information about the Greek and Roman World in digital form.

2. Pelagios takes this core ontology and investigates its adoption by five international projects, which are already finding ways of extracting and using placename information. Each representing a different kind of document type, they are:

• Google Ancient Places has been sponsored by Google to discover and represent place references in the unstructured XML of the Google Books Corpus. GAP is a consortium based at the OU, Southampton, Edinburgh and Berkeley with considerable experience in ancient geospatial data drawn from HESTIA, Open Context and CHALICE.
• The Perseus project is a world leader in providing digital resources of the ancient world, focused primarily on primary sources enriched with structural mark-up. It is backed by the US National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the Institute for Museum and Library Services, the Fund for the Improvement for Postsecondary Education, the Department of Education, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
• Arachne is the central object database of the German Archaeological Institute, hosted and developed in cooperation with the Cologne Digital Archaeology Laboratory at the University of Cologne. Arachne has over 5,000 registered users who can access its extensive OER materials (850,000 scanned images and documentation for c. 250,000 sites and objects) free of charge.
• SPQR is a JISC-funded project (JISCMRD Programme) using LOD approaches to provide integrated views across diverse resources relating to fragmentary ancient documents.
• The Digital Memory Engineering (DME) research group of the Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT) is exploring ways of enabling and integrating services for the Europeana cultural heritage Web portal (see the Annotation Prototype) with an expertise in map documents.

By having each project partner document the process by which they take up and use the ontology, Pelagios will provide a benchmark publication that offers guidance to the community for using linked open geo-data (a LOG paradigm). In addition, by bringing these existing international repositories of Ancient World resources together, Pelagios will encourage its partners to exchange data, practices and experience with each other, their large extant user-base, JISC, and users worldwide.

3. Finally, Pelagios will demonstrate the value of the ontology to non-technical users by experimenting with various accessible web services that could draw upon it.
Benefits (summary table)

Who?	What?	How?
Pelagios Partners	Partner projects are already investing considerable resources in geospatially annotating their holdings. Pelagios will enable them to do this in a common framework, thereby increasing reusability of their data.	ontology development; data annotation; process documentation; tool development; tool reviewing; workshop attendance.
Workshop attendees / Data publishers	Data publishers will benefit from both a field guide to LOG publication for multiple document types and a clear ontology against which their data can be validated.	constructive feedback through consultation; workshop attendance where possible.
End users (teachers, researchers, learners)	Easy-to-use web visualization tools will provide immediate access for researchers, students and members of the public. A REST-based Web service will give Digital Humanists the power to perform large scale queries and complex analyses.	interest in ancient geodata; adoption of tools and services.
JISC	Pelagios will provide JISC with a variety of infrastructure assets (ontology, documentation, tools) that enable it to offer strategic leadership in the field of Linked Open Geodata	funding; involvement in project meetings and dissemination; synthesis project; programme activities.

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).