SPQR triples - inscriptions and papyri

The SPQR project has produced just over half a million triples, describing approximately 57,500 inscriptions and papyri. The triples were derived from the following epigraphic and papyrological datasets:

• The Heidelberger Gesamtverzeichnis der griechischen Papyrusurkunden Aegyptens (HGV), a collection of metadata records for about 65,000 Greek papyri from Egypt
• The Inscriptions of Aphrodisias, a corpus of about 2,000 ancient Greek inscriptions from the city of Aphrodisias in modern Turkey.
• The Inscriptions of Roman Tripolitania, a corpus of about 1,000 inscriptions from modern Libya.

The triples can be downloaded as RDF/XML from the following links:

• HGV triples
  
• Aphrodisias and Tripolitania triples
  

Perseus and Pelagios

The Perseus geospatial data now includes annotations of ancient places with Pleiades URIs. Beginning next week, the Places widget in the Perseus interface will include links to download the Pleiades annotations in OAC compliant RDF format. These links will appear for any text with place entity markup which also has places from this dataset. We are also providing a link to search on the top five most frequently mentioned of these places in the Pelagios graph explorer.

In addition, RDF files containing annotations for the occurrences across all texts in each collection will be available from the Perseus Open Source Downloads page.

To produce these annotations, we used the normalized and regular place names from the Pleiades+ dataset to identify likely matches with the Perseus places, and then the longitude and latitude coordinates from each source to validate and disambiguate these matches. Places which matched via this method are annotated with an "is" relationship to the Pleiades URI. For Perseus places which were not automatically mapped to a Pleiades URI via this method, we do a second pass at matching using the location coordinates, looking for Pleiades places within a certain range of the Perseus coordinates. Places which matched via this method are annotated with a "nearby" relationship to the Pleiades URI. These mappings are all stored with the Perseus place data in our database, and are available along with the other geospatial data for occurrences of these entities in the Perseus texts.

Going forward, we hope to be able to continue to work on improving the automatic alignment of the Perseus and Pleiades+ place data, as well as providing the means for manual refinement and correction of the annotations. In this initial pass, we were able to automatically annotate a little over 15% of the distinct ancient place names already identified in the Perseus texts. We would like not only to increase the percentage of matches with the Pleiades data, but also to begin to take advantage methods for automatically identifying place entities in the many texts in the Perseus repository which do not yet have this level of curation.

Adding more Nomisma Annotations to Pelagios: Direct links to Hoards

I've updated the file of annotations that link Nomisma.org and Pleiades URIs. It's available at http://nomisma.org/nomisma.org.pelagios.rdf .

As a reminder, Nomisma.org is a project establishing stable web addresses (URIs) for concepts in numismatics, which is the study of coins. We have simple definitions of mints, as in the page at http://nomisma.org/id/athens. Go there and you'll see there's not yet much information about the ancient mint of Athens itself. You will, however, see a map of hoards in which coins of Athens were recorded. That's important evidence for economic connections in the ancient Mediterranean and beyond.

The first version of the Pelagios-compliant file that Nomisma published made simple "one-to-one" links from Nomisma mint URIs to the relevant Pleiades URIs. I've now updated the file so that all hoards are linked to the Pleiades URIs of the mints of coins within them. Or at least to the Pleiades URIs that we've entered to date. As in, the following XML excerpt indicates that hoard http://nomisma.org/id/igch0039 is linked to the Pleiades URI http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/579885.


  <rdf:Description rdf:ID="igch0039">
    <rdf:type rdf:resource="http://www.openannotation.org/ns/Annotation"/>
    <oac:hasBody rdf:resource="http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/579885"/>
    <oac:hasTarget rdf:resource="http://nomisma.org/id/igch0039"/>
    <dcterms:creator rdf:resource="http://nomisma.org/"/>
    <dcterms:title>Nomisma.org annotation linking http://nomisma.org/id/igch0039 to http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/579885</dcterms:title>
  </rdf:Description>

It's important to note that the annotation doesn't make the nature of the relationship clear. As in, there's no suggestion here that the URI http://nomisma.org/id/igch0039 is itself an alternate definition of Athens. The annotation only says that http://nomisma.org/id/igch0039 makes reference to or adds to our understanding of Athens. In this case, the additional information is that coins of Athens are found in that place. But once this new file is ingested, it will be up to the user to click through from the Pelagios browser to find out why the annotation was made. That's the case for all the varied information that is making its way into the rich Pleagios ecosystem.