Annotated corpora, provided that they adopt international standards and expose data in open format, have many more chances to be easily exploited and reused for different objectives than traditional, analogue corpora. This paper aims at presenting the results of the early adhesion to best practices and principles afterward codified as Open Science and FAIR principles in the frame of projects concerned with digital textual corpora, in a niche area of research such as the pre-Islamic Arabian epigraphy. The case study analysed in this paper is the Digital Archive for the Study of pre-Islamic Arabian inscriptions – DASI, an online annotated corpus of the textual sources from Ancient Arabia, which also exposes its records in standard formats (oai_dc, EpiDoc, EDM) in an OAI-PMH repository. The initiatives of reuse of DASI open data in the frame of the recently ANR-funded project Maparabia (CNRS-CNR) are discussed in the paper, focusing on the exploitation of DASI’s onomastic and geographic data in a new reference tool, the Gazetteer of Ancient Arabia. After introducing DASI and Maparabia projects and highlighting the objectives of the Gazetteer, the paper describes the conceptual model of its database and the module importing data from DASI. The population of the Gazetteer, implying also a data entry and manipulation phase, is exemplified by the case-study of the Ancient South Arabian place ‘Barāqish/Yathill’. Based on the above experience, limitations and opportunities of data reuse and synchronisation issues between systems are discussed.
The information expressed in humanities datasets is inextricably tied to a wider discursive environment that is irreducible to complete formal representation. Humanities scholars must wrestle with this fact when they attempt to publish or consume structured data. The practice of “nanopublication,” which originated in the e-science domain, offers a way to maintain the connection between formal representations of humanities data and its discursive basis. In this paper we describe nanopublication, its potential applicability to the humanities, and our experience curating humanities nanopublications in the PeriodO period gazetteer.
This article is a report about the progress and current status of the World Historical Gazetteer (whgazetteer.org) (WHG) in the context of its value for helping to organize and record digital and paleographic information. It summarizes the development and functionality of the WHG as a software platform for connecting specialist collections of historical place names. It also reviews the idea of places as entities (rather than simple objects with single labels). It also explains the utility of gazetteers in digital library infrastructure and describes potential future developments.
Descriptions of time and the temporal attributes of people, events, and things are fundamental to the discussion of the past. When scholars attempt to represent information about the past as structured data, however, the inconsistencies in the ways we describe and annotate time become major stumbling blocks to the aggregation and reuse of historical datasets. This chapter presents some practical steps scholars can take to standardize chronological information in their data, and to take advantage of Linked Data resources to enrich their own datasets and make their data more useful to others. Using a hypothetical list of papyri as an example, the chapter discusses calendrical systems, standardized date formats for absolute time in digital environments, and the definition of relative expressions of time-divisions like periods with reference to external Linked Data authorities. It concludes with an overview of the process for adding new user-generated periods to the PeriodO Linked Data gazetteer of period definitions.
The PeriodO project seeks to fill a gap in the landscape of digital antiquity through the creation of a Linked Data gazetteer of period definitions that transparently record the spatial and temporal boundaries assigned to a given period by an authoritative source. Our presentation of the PeriodO gazetteer is prefaced by a history of the role of periodization in the study of the past, and an analysis of the difficulties created by the use of periods for both digital data visualization and integration. This is followed by an overview of the PeriodO data model, a description of the platform's architecture, and a discussion of the future direction of the project.
This article first focuses on the emergence of a scholarly discourse on periodization. That discourse includes historians' efforts to diversify criteria for individuating periods, and philosophers' analyses of periodization as a form of historiographical theorizing. Next the article turns to the dynamic interaction between scholarly periodization and the broader institutionalization of periodizations. This is followed by a brief review of arguments against periodization. The article ends with a look at how periodizations are treated in knowledge organization systems (KOS).
Designers of networked knowledge organization systems often follow a service-oriented design strategy, assuming an organizational model where one party outsources clearly delineated business processes to another party. But the logic of outsourcing is a poor fit for some knowledge organization practices. When knowledge organization is understood as a process of exchange among peers, a sharing-oriented design strategy makes more sense. As an example of a sharing-oriented strategy for designing networked knowledge organization systems, we describe the design of the PeriodO period gazetteer. We analyze the PeriodO data model, its representation using JavaScript Object Notation-Linked Data, and the management of changes to the PeriodO dataset. We conclude by discussing why a sharing-oriented design strategy is appropriate for organizing scholarly knowledge.