Last month, a dozen or so scholars met in London (and were joined by a similar number via remote video-conference) to discuss and work on the open data produced by the Epigraphic Database Heidelberg. (See call and description.)
Over the course of the day seven working groups were formed, two of which completed their briefs within the day, but the other five will lead to ongoing work and discussion. Fuller reports from the individual groups will follow here shortly, but here is a short summary of the activities, along with links to the pages in the Wiki of the OEDUc Github repository.
Useful links:
- All interested colleagues are welcome to join the discussion group: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/oeduc
- Code, documentation, and other notes are collected in the Github repository: https://github.com/EpiDoc/OEDUc
1. Disambiguating EDH person RDF
(Gabriel Bodard, Núria García Casacuberta, Tom Gheldof, Rada Varga)
We discussed and broadly specced out a couple of steps in the process for disambiguating PIR references for inscriptions in EDH that contain multiple personal names, for linking together person references that cite the same PIR entry, and for using Trismegistos data to further disambiguate EDH persons. We haven’t written any actual code to implement this yet, but we expect a few Python scripts would do the trick.
2. Epigraphic ontology
(Hugh Cayless, Paula Granados, Tim Hill, Thomas Kollatz, Franco Luciani, Emilia Mataix, Orla Murphy, Charlotte Tupman, Valeria Vitale, Franziska Weise)
This group discussed the various ontologies available for encoding epigraphic information (LAWDI, Nomisma, EAGLE Vocabularies) and ideas for filling the gaps between this. This is a long-standing desideratum of the EpiDoc community, and will be an ongoing discussion (perhaps the most important of the workshop).
3. Images and image metadata
(Angie Lumezeanu, Sarah Middle, Simona Stoyanova)
This group attempted to write scripts to track down copyright information on images in EDH (too complicated, but EAGLE may have more of this), download images and metadata (scripts in Github), and explored the possibility of embedding metadata in the images in IPTC format (in progress).
4. EDH and SNAP:DRGN mapping
(Rada Varga, Scott Vanderbilt, Gabriel Bodard, Tim Hill, Hugh Cayless, Elli Mylonas, Franziska Weise, Frank Grieshaber)
In this group we revised the status of SNAP:DRGN recommendations for person-data in RDF, and then looked in detail about the person list exported from the EDH data. A list of suggestions for improving this data was produced for EDH to consider. This task was considered to be complete. (Although Frank may have feedback or questions for us later.)
5. EDH and Pelagios NER
(Orla Murphy, Sarah Middle, Simona Stoyanova, Núria Garcia Casacuberta, Thomas Kollatz)
This group explored the possibility of running machine named entity extraction on the Latin texts of the EDH inscriptions, in two stages: extracting plain text from the XML (code in Github); applying CLTK/NLTK scripts to identify entities (in progress).
6. EDH and Pelagios location disambiguation
(Paula Granados, Valeria Vitale, Franco Luciani, Angie Lumezeanu, Thomas Kollatz, Hugh Cayless, Tim Hill)
This group aimed to work on disambiguating location information in the EDH data export, for example making links between Geonames place identifiers, TMGeo places, Wikidata and Pleiades identifiers, via the Pelagios gazetteer or other linking mechanisms. A pathway for resolving was identified, but work is still ongoing.
7. Exist-db mashup application
(Pietro Liuzzo)
This task, which Dr Liuzzo carried out alone, since his network connection didn’t allow him to join any of the discussion groups on the day, was to create an implementation of existing code for displaying and editing epigraphic editions (using Exist-db, Leiden+, etc.) and offer a demonstration interface by which the EDH data could be served up to the public and contributions and improvements invited. (A preview “epigraphy.info” perhaps?)
