xEAC in London: SNAP 2014

I was recently in London to discuss ANS participation in the Standards for Networking Ancient Prosopographies meeting, hosted by King's College London, March 31 - April 1. Most Roman imperial people related to coins have already had URIs minted about them on nomisma.org, and we are about to create nomisma IDs for Roman Republican moneyers. Additionally, we will be creating a large number of Greek authorities in the coming months. The as-of-now institutionally unaffiliated kerameikos.org is another thesaurus which will contain numerous URIs for Greek potters and painters which may supplement SNAP with biographical information or objects of cultural heritage. Lastly, I discussed the Roman Imperial Social Network (RISN) project, for which we have requested a grant to develop further. This is a prosopography of the Roman Empire built on EAC-CPF from existing open resources on the web (such as Tom Elliott's PIR RDF and DBpedia) and embellished with xEAC to include important life events, occupations, and places (linked to Pleiades).

Meeting Overview

The meeting was a great experience, and I always find these sorts of gatherings (like LAWDI) useful for learning what other people are working on. There was, of course, some overlap from previous LAWDIs, in terms of participants or projects. The Syriac Reference Portal once again made an appearance, as did Tresmigestos. Maggie Robb is working on a prosopography of the Roman Republic, and so there's a possibility for collaboration between her project and nomisma.org, as we are going to create nomisma IDs for Republican moneyers in the coming weeks, and will certainly incorporate her URIs into our system. Day 1 included presentations and discussions by SNAP organizers as well as a selected group of participants which have either potential datasets to include in SNAP or are using tools or other methodologies for prosopographies. My presentation contained a bit of both tools/methodologies and datasets. In Day 2, the meeting participants split into smaller groups for focused break-out sessions on various topics.