Concordia (April 2008 – March 2009)

Before applying for a second major grant to transform Pleiades from a prototype to a production-level resource, it seemed useful not only to have the basic system up and available, but to test its utility in a practical way by linking it to other types of ancient-world digital publications. The Concordia Project was designed for this purpose. This one-year effort is bringing together a variety of digital information (including papyrological documents, epigraphic texts and historical geographic data in Pleiades) to create a prototype interoperability framework for research materials related to the history of Greek and Roman Egypt, and beyond. The project is co-directed by Roger Bagnall (ISAW) and Charlotte Roueché (Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, King's College, London). It is supported through a Joint Transatlantic Digitization Collaboration grant by the NEH and the Higher Education funding Council for England of the United Kingdom acting through the Joint Information Systems Committee. The project team includes Gabriel Bodard (Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's), Tom Elliott (ISAW) and Sean Gillies (ISAW).

One key experiment will deploy the Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) specification to indicate thematic and spatial commonalities and relationships amongst the content of multiple, discrete digital publications. Of particular interest are methods for determining and displaying in Pleiades links to information in other databases and web applications. So, for example, for each place record in Pleiades, we would like to be able to provide users automatically with links to papyri and inscriptions associated with the site but stored and described elsewhere on the web. If we are successful in developing the methods to support such a feature under the Concordia rubric, it will be incorporated into Pleiades in future work.

In early May 2008, the Concordia team met in New York for the first of two workshops. In addition to the core participants, we were joined by technical representatives from other projects interested in forging interoperability links with Pleiades and the other digital publications addressed by the project: the NEH-funded Advanced Papyrological Information System (Rodney Ast, Columbia), the American Numismatic Society (Sebastian Heath), the Mellon-funded Integrating Digital Papyrology Project (Ben Armintor, Columbia) and the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names (Sebastian Rahtz, Oxford). One full day of the workshop focused on strategies for interoperability in the domain of historical geography. All participants are keen to exploit the stable Pleiades web addresses in their own systems to provide identifiers for geographic entities, name lists and controlled vocabularies around which data entry, new web services, spatially-aware queries and geographic visualization can be organized. The lack of comprehensive coverage equivalent to (or more extensive than) that provided in print by the [BAtlas Barrington Atlas] was identified as a major roadblock to moving forward on this aspect.

The workshop participants devised an interim plan for creating stable Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) corresponding to all the features in the Barrington Atlas and then establishing a simple web application to redirect a web browser from one of these URIs to the corresponding Pleiades entry when available. These “BAtlas Identifiers” provide an immediate mechanism for geographically-relevant, cross-project queries and citations, even though they do not provide geospatial coordinates as the Pleiades records do. They will also provide a basis for programmatically linking to Pleiades all the Barrington Atlas citations in any future digitized versions of post-2000 print works. Creation of the BAtlas IDs is significantly easier than full digitization of [CAP] content for Pleiades, although significant code development and testing was required. The first partial release of these identifiers occurred in early July and iterative production culminated in a full release in early September 2008. Work on the web application to link them to Pleiades content is on-going during Fall 2008.

For more information on Concordia and associated activities, see the Concordia Development Wiki.