MEKETRE - New Project Partner Introduction

The MEKETRE project seeks to systematically collect, research, and study the reliefs and paintings of Middle Kingdom tombs of Ancient Egypt. One of its main aims is to map and elaborate the development of the scenes and their content in comparison to the Old Kingdom. The project is funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and has a duration of three years (late 2009 until late 2012). The project's technical part features an online repository (the MEKETREpository) for easy exploration of the collected data.

Collected Data

The data in the MEKETREpository is, at the highest level, structured into tombs and fragments that contain themes, i.e. specific types of scenes that are part of the tomb decoration programme. Additional information can be attached to these themes in the form of annotations. To each tomb, theme and fragment multiple annotations can be attached that, e.g., highlight specific regions of interest. Furthermore, they connect these regions to descriptions which can be provided as free-text but also as classification terms or keywords from a controlled vocabulary. Annotations are an intuitive means to structure and organize information, for both data consumers and producers.

So far, the egyptological staff of the project has gathered an extensive amount of data, e.g.:

• >240 Objects: ~114 Tombs, ~120 Themes, ~8 Fragments
• >570 Images (3.5 GB)
• ~1900 Annotations
• ~500 Basic Terms, ~500 Classification Terms
• >1700 References to >200 Publications

As mentioned above, the project also develops a controlled multilingual vocabulary with the main purpose to unify the terminology used for the descriptions of icons attested in the two-dimensional art. It is also published online as Linked Data and available for download in various serialization formats.

Linked Data Utilization

Every item in the repository can be viewed by using a webbrowser (cf. this item). Additionally, there is also the option to download an RDF representation of the item by clicking at triple icon on the top left of the page.

The controlled vocabularies used for annotating the repository items are created by using the third-party web application PoolParty. The tool supports scholors from the Egyptology domain in collaboratively building an online thesaurus following the SKOS de-facto standard for controlled vocabularies on the web. Our thesaurus is linked directly from the project's homepage or can be accessed directly from the PoolParty server.

In our implementation we use a MySQL database together with Triplify to generate the RDF representation of our content. It aims to adopt and reuse as many existing vocabularies as possible (e.g., Dublin Core, FOAF) but also makes use of our own core vocabulary.

Future Work

As a next step we intend to extend our repository by a separate web application that supports easy contribution (e.g., image uploading, creation of annotations, suggestion of new vocabulary terms) for interested users without scientific background. The goal is to collect even more material on Middle Kingdom artwork that can then be reviewed and amended by scholars. If the quality has reaches the necessary level, the material will be integrated into the MEKETREpository.

Announcing the Pelagios widgets

The Pelagios widgets are small applications that you can put on your website to allow users of your site to see data from Pelagios partners.There are two widgets, one to display information about places you mention on your site, the other allows people to search for information related to places.

Pelagios Place Widget 

The first widget is the Pelagios Place Widget. This is an icon with the Pelagios logo that you can add to your website. When you add it you specify a particular place in the Pleiades gazetteer and the widget will then provide information about that place.

Here is a screenshot of the icon which you can see after the link to Delphi.

When the user clicks on the icon, they then get information about Delphi from the Pelagios partners as well as relevant photos from Flickr.:

You can see a live demonstration of the widget for Corinth here by clicking on this icon:  (opens in a new tab or window). There is also  a live demonstration of the widget as an overlay for Corinth here along with demonstrations for a selection of other places.

There are various options when you embed the widget. For example, you can choose the whole widget to display immediately rather than via an icon which is clicked open, or you can choose for the map to not be displayed.

Pelagios Search Widget 

This consists of a search box. If you search for a place then it will show you all the matches for that place as a list and on a map. You can then click on each one to obtain data from Pelagios partners about each place.

Live demonstration of the search widget

How to embed the widgets 

You can add the Pelagios widgets to your site by adding a small snippet of HTML to your page. There are full instructions for embedding the widgets here.

Some sites, in particular most blogging and content management systems, have restrictions on the HTML you can add, and in particular will not allow you to add Javascript. For these, you can add the Pelagios Place Widget via an image and link, although the widget will open in a new tab or window. Hopefully at some point in the future we will be able to turn the widgets into Wordpress plug-ins, Google gadgets and other formats that may be able to help with this. .

Feedback 

We would warmly welcome and feedback on the widgets and suggestions for future work on them - please send any comments to me at j.culver@open.ac.uk. Please do also feel free to try embedding them on your sites and let us know if you have any problems or if the documentation could be improved.

More about the widgets 

There is much more information about the widgets on the Pelagios Widget pages and the source code is available on Github released under Gnu Public Licence v3. They were developed here at the Institute of Educational Technology at The Open University.

Geographical information retrieval of historical regions

In the last few weeks I have been developing some API and an interface over the PELAGIOS API in order to be able to retrieve historical places, and their relative annotations, by using some geographical context. The issue of superimposing a geographical representation over some data collection is not novel. In modern data collections, for example the data produced by public administrations nowadays, organisations use geographical nomenclatures such as the administrative subdivisions, or the NUTS if the data is statistical observations. 

For historical data collections this is not always feasible, since the administrations of past kingdoms not always provided a sharp definition of their boundaries (sharp meant in a modern sense, with precise coordinates for regions' shapes) nor a deep subdivision which can help our information retrieval task.

Fortunately for PELAGIOS' users, some of the boundaries for the provinces of the past roman empire have been made available as shape files, and this can help us in browsing the wealth of data annotations provided as geolocalized linked data. The shape files in question were digitised from Barrington Atlas rasters (georegistered and supplied by AWMC) by Pedar Foss at Depauw University in 2007 within the context of the MAGIS project, and have been provided by Tom Elliott from the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University. The regions represented can be seen in the figure below.

Roman provinces up to AD 117 visualised in CartoDB

The present post is not about a single API or a single interface that can be implemented on top of PELAGIOS data and services, but instead it aims to provide some insights on how to implement geographical browsing by using open source tools. 

In order to visualize places and annotations from PELAGIOS API we exploited the geographical search by bounding box. By retrieving places in the PELAGIOS network contained by a bounding box we are half way to filter them via any polygon. In fact, by adopting a GIS we could directly querying data by polygons. Unfortunately that would require to have all the annotation data and the regions' polygons stored in the same database which is against the principle of distributeness of the linked data paradigm and it is not feasible in general scnarios. In fact that solution would require to provide a version of the PELAGIOS data to any interested user that would be forced to install GIS software and host their particular polygons. 

Instead, in here, what we did is to decouple the management of the annotation data with the geographical retrieval features, trying to minimize the amount of software to install and reusing as much as possible the data and services already provided. For this reason we uploaded the polygons we were interested on in a web enabled version of postgis, called CartoDB. CartoDB allows a limited and free use of the web platform, but users can download the open source version and install it on a server if and when needed. CartoDB allows to run SQL queries over HTTP requests that allow developers to integrate the system easily.

As said earlier, once we have the capability to query by bounding box we are half way to being able to query by polygons. In fact, by querying the CartoDB we can retrieve the shape of a region by using its name (e.g. Aquitania in the figures below). If we want to retrieve all the PELAGIOS places contained in the Aquitania region we can query the PELAGIOS API for the places contained in the bounding box of the polygon first, and then filter those places based on the topological containment applied to the retrieved shape. 

Selection of PELAGIOS places by using
region's bounding box

Filtering of those resources by using the
polygon topological containment 

The activities involved to extract places by using polygons can be represented by the diagram below and involve three actors: the service implemented by the ECS dept. in Southampton (named ECS), the PELAGIOS API, and the CartoDB instance used for this scenario.