About Us

The Pelagios Network is a long-running initiative that links information online through common references to places, and more recently through time periods and people. Pelagios represents a community of individuals, projects and organizations working with historical data. Part of its work in evolving the LOD ecosystem is developing open methods and tools.

How does it work?

The Pelagios Network is a free and open association of equal and interdependent Partners. These Partners represent a range of work being carried out across the humanities (history, language and literary studies, archaeology, etc.), and cultural heritage (galleries, libraries, archives and museums).

In order to further develop work in this area, the Pelagios Network focuses on core Activities in the following areas:

• Annotation, which supports the use of semantic annotation to link and explore historical place information;
• Gazetteers, which establishes core requirements for global authority files on historic places and their alignment;
• Registry, which establishes services for registering and discovering linked data collections for places;
• Time, which finds consensus on the representation of historical time in structured data;
• Visualisation, which develops methods and tools which make use of semantic annotation.
• People, which works towards consensus and standards for common representation of historical people in structured Linked Open Data

Each Activity meets roughly every other month, to address issues and challenges related to the particular focus area. Meetings involve:

• hearing from partners, sharing and developing good practice, and offering consultancy;
• developing collaboration among partners (e.g. funding bids, sharing resources);
• developing tool documentation (e.g. tutorials) and sharing pedagogical ideas/tools/exercises related to LOD for use in education and the creative and cultural sectors;
• guest speakers from outside academia, such as from journalism or commerce.

How are we governed?

As an equal and open partnership, coordination and management of the Network is in the hands of the Partners.

• Each Activity is run by two Coordinators elected from the Partners of that Activity. In addition to organizing the regular Activity meetings, Coordinators meet once a month for the General Business meeting, at which each Activity provides a report, network-wide issues are discussed, and new Partners to the Network are elected. Coordinators typically serve for two years.
• Oversight of the Network’s general business (including the meeting) is managed by three Officers, typically drawn from the Activity Coordinators: a Chair, a General Secretary, and a Partnership Secretary. Like Activity Coordinators, Officers’ terms are typically for a duration of two years. The Officers’ duties are described here. The current office holders are:
  • Chair: Anne Chen
  • General Secretary: Gethin Rees
  • Partnership Secretary: Elton Barker
• Any Partner can become a Coordinator and, by extension, an Officer. Elections for these posts are held every two years. While not required, any Partner is also welcome to attend the monthly General Business meeting. To get involved, click here