Pelagios API Documentation

Just a quick announcement to let everyone know that we now (finally) have some API documentation available as part of the ever-growing Pelagios Cookbook. The documentation is aimed at developers who want to build their own applications or mashups using data from the Pelagios network of partners.

You can find it here: Using Pelagios > Using the Pelagios API

Perseus Pelagios Compliancy

Perseus is happy to announce that our Pleiades annotations are now fully Pelagios-compliant and are viewable in the new Pelagios API.

The Perseus annotations are browseable at
http://pelagios.dme.ait.ac.at/api/datasets/21e48d8ca46f666467b81a551fbb1cb

Our first step, publishing annotations identifying occurrences of ancient places represented by Pleiades URIs in the Perseus texts, was described in a Pelagios blog post last year.

Subsequently, we have made some refinements to the process which included:

• Following the Pelagios standard for referencing Pleiades places using the #this locator on the Pleiades URIs.
• Simplifying labeling on the annotations.
• As part of a wider effort at Perseus to better support Linked Open Data and CTS standards, referencing the Perseus text annotation targets using stable URIs in the data.perseus.org namespace, leveraging CTS URNs. E.g.:

  http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:greekLang:tlg0016.tlg001.perseus-eng1:1.149

• Publishing the annotations themselves at resolvable URIs which more accurately reflect the hierarchy of the occurrences both within the texts, and within the annotation datasets. E.g.:

  http://data.perseus.org/annotations/occur/places:pleiades/urn:cts:greekLang:tlg0016.tlg001.perseus-eng1#5

• Publishing a VoID file to describe the annotation datasets at http://data.perseus.org/annotations/occur/places:pleiades/void.ttl 

All of which contribute to enabling some very cool linking possibilities, as demonstrated by the Pelagios API:

Pelagios API Alpha Launch!

Those of you following us closely (especially through our twitter account) will have noticed that we have - almost silently - started to populate our all-new Pelagios API with data from our partners. The API is the centerpiece of our Workpackage 1, and exposes human- and machine-readable views (HTML, JSON and RDF) on the place references we aggregate from our partners.

From a user's point of view, the API will currently tell you things such as:

• Which Pelagios partners have data available for a particular place? (For example: Athens, Rome or Pompeii.)
• What are the datasets currently listed by Pelagios, and what can you expect to find in there? (For example: Arachne, FASTI Online, nomisma or the Ure Museum.)
• What is the data available for a particular place, in a particular dataset? (For example: Open Context Data for Petra, or texts from the Perseus Digital Library referencing Sparta.)

We are still busy testing and completing the current implementation, as well as getting all our partners' data included. Plus, we're adding more advanced features, so watch this space - and be prepared for the occasional downtime as we are deploying updates... But apart from that, you are more than welcome to browse around, try it out, and let us know your feedback!

http://pelagios.dme.ait.ac.at/api