Standards for Networking Ancient Prosopography: Data and Relations in Greco-roman Names (SNAP:DRGN) is a one-year pilot project, based at King’s College London in collaboration with colleagues from the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names (Oxford), Trismegistos (Leuven), Papyri.info (Duke) and Pelagios (Southampton), and hopes to include many more data partners by the end of this first year. Much of the early discussion of this project took place at the LAWDI school in 2013. Our goal is to recommend standards for sharing relatively minimalist data about classical and other ancient prosopographical and onomastic datasets in RDF, thereby creating a huge graph of person-data that scholars can:
- query to find individuals, patterns, relationships, statistics and other information;
- follow back to the richer and fuller source information in the contributing database;
- contribute new datasets or individual persons, names and textual references/attestations;
- annotate to declare identity between persons (or co-reference groups) in different source datasets;
- annotate to express other relationships between persons/entities in different or the same source dataset (such as familial relationships, legal encounters, etc.)
- use URIs to annotate texts and other references to names with the identity of the person to whom they refer (similar to Pelagios’s model for places using Pleiades).
More detailed description (plus successful funding bid document, if you’re really keen) can be found at <http://snapdrgn.net/about>.
Our April workshop invited a handful of representative data-holders and experts in prosopography and/or linked open data to spend two days in London discussing the SNAP:DRGN project, their own data and work, and approaches to sharing and linking prosopographical data in general. We presented a first draft of the SNAP:DRGN “Cookbook”, the guidelines for formatting a subset of prosopographical data in RDF for contribution to the SNAP graph, and received some extremely useful feedback on individual technical issues and the overall approach. A summary of the workshop, and slides from many of the presentations, can be found at <http://snapdrgn.net/archives/110>.
In the coming weeks we shall announce the first public version of the SNAP ontology, the Cookbook, and the graph of our core and partner datasets and annotations. For further discussion about the project, and linked data for prosopography in general, you can also join the Ancient-People Googlegroup (where I posted a summary similar to this post earlier today).
