CORMSIS Seminar - Linked Open Geodata and the Pelagios Commons Event

Event details

Abstract: Pelagios Commons is an international community-driven initiative concerned with the development of Linked Open Data methods, tools and services so as to better interconnect the vast and ever-growing range of historical resources online. Specifically, it uses the Open Annotation1 RDF ontology to associate place references within those resources to online gazetteers that offer URI-based identifiers for such places. The resulting graph is then exploited in a variety of ways to facilitate research, teaching and public engagement. Earlier phases of the Pelagios project addressed three critical challenges for stimulating activity in these areas. First, we developed user-friendly Web-based and Open Source software tools for the production and exploration of Pelagios LOD. Second we carried out much annotation both in house and by independent contributors. Third, we developed a mechanism for enabling different gazetteers to be interoperable, allowing for interlinking between data from divergent traditions. In parallel with these developments a community of practitioners has emerged with interests in a range of related activities: the annotation of curated or third-party content; the production of specialist gazetteers; the integration of place annotations with those of people, periods and things; and the visualization and analysis of graph-based data, to name but a few. This presentation will report on recent developments within the project which focus explicitly on increasing its technical and social decentralization.