Methods, Standards, and Vocabularies

While the idea of linking information is simple, the technical know-how needed to publish or make use of LOD is not inconsiderable. For this reason, Pelagios Partners have co-created methods which, along with related tools, lower technical barriers to enable humanities scholars and cultural heritage practitioners to participate in doing LOD.

The Pelagios Way

The Pelagios Way uses semantic annotation based on the W3C Web Annotation Data Model. This specification describes a structured model and format to enable annotations to be shared and reused across different hardware and software platforms.

Instead of compelling everyone to remodel their data according to a single overarching ontology (such as the CIDOC-CRM), the Pelagios way simply expresses that entities (places, people, time periods) should be annotated with reference to a unique and stable record provided by global authorities in the form of Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs).

So, for example, the semantic annotation of place references in a document is a two-step process: first, you mark the reference as a place; then you align that note to the appropriate record in a global authority of place information (a URI-based gazetteer). By this lightweight means, different resources (texts, images, databases) hosted by different data providers can be connected by having machine-readable links.

Standards and Vocabularies

Pelagios use a number of lightweight, open approaches for describing linked historical data. These standards enable data to move easily between tools and projects.

Linked Places format — A simple model for linking location-based data — used in gazetteers, annotation tools, and visualisation platforms.
Linked Traces format — A model for describing movement, itineraries, and historical routes, developed through Pelagios-related work.

On-going work includes:

Infrastructures for Managing and Publishing Large Heterogeneous Linked Datasets — a proposed standard for addressing the question how datasets can be managed and published in a form that is flexible, scalable, interoperable and, ultimately, sustainable.
Web Maps-T white paper — a standardised, inclusive approach to the visualisation of geospatial and temporal LOD.
Linking object biographies — a data model developed according to Linked Art and CIDOC CRM standards using semantic annotations made in RecogitoStudio, for converting unstructured data into structured formats to trace the routes and histories of objects in collections.
Cultural Heritage AI (CHAI) cookbook — a series of notebooks for using LLMs in combination with LOD approaches to enable the FAIR data enrichment of cultural heritage collections at scale, using the processes of recognition, disambiguation, and relation of named entities, as well as evaluation and visualisation applications.