We start the project with
- The Heidelberger Gesamtverzeichnis der griechischen Papyrusurkunden Aegyptens (HGV), a collection of metadata records for 65,000 Greek papyri from Egypt.
- Projet Volterra, a database of Roman legal texts, currently in the low tens of thousands but very much work in progress, stored in a series of themed tables in Microsoft Access.
- The Inscriptions of Aphrodisias (InsAph), a corpus of 2,000 ancient Greek inscriptions from the Roman city of Aphrodisias. We will also include the Inscriptions of Roman Tripolitania, a further 1,000 inscriptions from Libya in the same format as InsAph. While these datasets are heterogeneous in content, they overlap conceptually and in terms of time, places and people – specifically, they cover the first five centuries or so of the Roman Empire.
As well as using Linked Data approaches to integrate these datasets, we will also address how this allows us to to link into a broad range of other web-based resources that expose relevant information in “linkable” form, such as RDF, RDFa etc. Particularly notable examples include:
- The Pleiades Project, which provides (via a RESTful web service) a catalogue of ancient place-names derived from the Barrington Atlas.
- The Lexicon of Greek Personal Names, which exposes ancient Greek names as URLs that resolve to a representation of information about the name or person in XML, JSON or RDF.
- The American Numismatic Society’s collection of coins, whose entries can be referenced by stable URLs, or by domain namespace identifiers (DNIDs), e.g. numismatics.org:1933.23.1.
- Papyri.info, which exposes bibliographical and other metadata for papyrological databases.
There are, however, a variety of others, including catalogues of coins and other textbearing objects, archaeological datasets and vocabularies, and museum/cultural heritage collections. We will use/link to these as deemed appropriate during the project.