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.

Welcome to Pelagios - Phase 2

Pelagios is a growing collective of ancient world projects who are linking together their data so that scholars and members of the public are able to discover all different kinds of stuff about ancient places.

Phase 1 has been the proof of concept. In this stage we have linked some core ancient world projects to each other through the concept of place (a Pleiades URI) and a baseline ontology (Open Annotation). The value of those linkages is demonstrated in the Pelagios Explorer, which allows users to discover and investigate the data from those different projects in a handy search interface.

The second phase of Pelagios is to formalize that process by which anyone can join or enjoy the fruits of the Pelagios superhighway. We will provide a ‘digital toolkit’ for anyone producing material about the ancient world—not just universities but also museums, libraries, etc­—, so that their data will be more discoverable and usable. We will also be experimenting further with methods of visualizing that data so that subject specialist users and the general public can discover information about places that interest them, without having the technical expertise to do the digging themselves.

The Pelagios kick-off meeting in Greenwich: (back row) Andy Meadows (Nomisma), Sebastian Rahtz (CLAROS), Liz Fitzgerald (IET), Amy Smith (Ure Museum), Elton Barker (OU), Rainer Simon (DME), Alex Dutton (CLAROS); (front row) Leif Isaksen (Southampton), Simon Hohl & Rasmus Krempel (Arachne), Juliette Culver (IET)

It was taken by a plaque reading "Greenwich: still the centre of space and time"

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