PeriodO Project Update

PeriodO Advisory Committee Meeting Update (2017-09-25)

http://perio.do meeting notes: Lex Berman

The PeriodO project has developed methods for organizing, comparing, searching and – most importantly – referencing named historical periods as linked data.

Now in a second round of funding, the project is working on improving its search, reconciliation, and visualization services, and is reaching out to other projects and organizations in the spheres of digital humanities, libraries and spatio-temporal information retrieval to create a common framework for using the historical period definitions in all manner of queries and analytical processes.

Content Update

1. adding as a batch ingest, the Library Of Congress subject headings for named period to PeriodO, to achieve a Lowest Common Denominator approach, rather than a fine-grained integration of many specialized time periods from various sources. See progress: https://test.perio.do/#/p/Canonical/periodCollections/p06c6g3/

2. adding 18^th and 19^th Century entries to reveal how the concept of the periodization changed historically. Examples of these collections: http://n2t.net/ark:/99152/p05hrsf ; http://n2t.net/ark:/99152/p0jf288

3. adding periods from graphical sources, such as those found in Cartographies of Time, by Daniel Rosenberg. https://www.papress.com/html/product.details.dna?isbn=9781568987637

4. examine the way in which historical periods are represented in EpiDoc with the objective of being able to integrate period definitions to and from PeriodO. https://sourceforge.net/p/epidoc/wiki/Home/

5. reaching out to new potential collaborators, such as

Digitizing Early Farming Cultures (Austrian Centre for DH) https://defc.acdh.oeaw.ac.at/

Inscriptions of Israel & Palestine (Brown Univ) http://cds.library.brown.edu/projects/Inscriptions/

Technical Update

1. adding “derivedFrom” relations to the data model, using the Provenance Ontology https://www.w3.org/TR/prov-o/

2. adding Broader and Narrower terms from the SKOS vocabulary https://www.w3.org/2009/08/skos-reference/skos.html

3. adding “conflationOf” relations, which will enable users to pick their own subset of named periods and group them into a single entity, as in their own preferred representation of a period (by leaving out those they specifically do not want to include). No existing vocabulary was identified yet.

4. language tags are being switched from 3 character codes (including script definitions) back to 2 character codes. See: http://perio.do/technical-overview/#labels-and-documentation

5. discussed the use of Language references as URIs, such as http://www.lexvo.org/linkeddata/faq.html

6. refered to methods for the annotation of items with specific assertions and source citations. Recommended to investigate the use of http://nanopub.org/wordpress/?page_id=65 (possibly for other projects, rather than PeriodO).

7. the timeline (time range) histogram is being redesigned as a stand-alone D3 block with more functionality.

8. discussed the general methods for spatio-temporal concepts in the case of data reconciliation. Since OpenRefine lacks specific methods for spatio-temporal filtering, PeriodO has it’s own method: https://github.com/periodo/periodo-reconciler

Outreach and future collaboration

Interesting projects mentioned:

Monadic Exploration (of digitized topics) http://mariandoerk.de/monadicexploration/demo/#-1:00000

Workshop on Temporal Dynamics in Digital Libraries https://tddl2017.github.io/

Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship (proposal phase) http://www.uoguelph.ca/~sbrown/#projects

WarSampo (Finnish WWII on the Semantic Web) http://seco.cs.aalto.fi/projects/sotasampo/en/

Social Networks and Archival Context Project http://snaccooperative.org

overview : http://archive1.village.virginia.edu/spw4s/SNAC/

Data Liberate (Richard Wallis’ blog) http://dataliberate.com/blog/

Participants in the 2017-09-25 Meeting

Adam Rabinowitz https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/classics/faculty/atr253

Ryan Shaw https://sils.unc.edu/people/faculty/ryan-shaw