Our Methods and Tools
While the main business of the Network is conducted through regular Activity meetings, Pelagios is more than just about growing a community that can offer consultancy and support. Fundamentally, Pelagios is also about developing methods and tools that lower technical barriers and allow humanities and cultural heritage practitioners to work more effectively together in evolving the LOD ecosystem. This works not through any core funding but through the Network’s scaffolding of distributive resilience. In this new model of development, individual sources of funding, often very small, are pooled together to build on existing methods and tools, in order to meet the evolving needs of the community as a whole. This model both addresses the sustainability challenges inherent to dependency on a single source of funding or institutional support, and attempts to avoid reduplication of efforts and resources.
Methods
Working with international collaborators, Pelagios has co-created a lightweight but universally applicable method of linking online materials of different types (texts, images, databases), which are hosted by different global data providers. The method used is the annotation of place references. Instead of compelling everyone to remodel their data according to a single overarching ontology (such as the CIDOC-CRM), the Pelagios method simply states that each data publisher identifies the places mentioned in their data and then align those references to the appropriate record in a global authority of place information — a unique and stable record or Uniform Resource Identifier (URI). By means of annotating place references with gazetteer URIs, resources hosted by different data providers become machine readable, meaning that they are more discoverable, reusable, and interoperable.
The Pelagios method for creating semantic annotations is 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. In addition, Pelagios Partners have developed the following:
- The Linked Places format, an extension to GeoJSON that provides temporal scoping capability and compatibility with RDF. It is used to describe attestations of places in a standard way, primarily for linking gazetteer datasets.
- The Linked Traces format, an initiative aimed at creating use cases of the W3C Annotation Model. It is used to annotate attestations of historical phenomena with the places relevant to them. It is a supported format in both Recogito and Peripleo (see below).
With its previous community grants (2017-2019), and now through its Activities, Pelagios is also supporting working groups for developing standards for shared conceptual elements that underlie humanistic disciplines and cultural heritage, e.g.:
Tools
As teaching, research and curation pivot online, a number of challenges need to be addressed that cut across humanities domains and cultural heritage institutions — namely disciplinary and organisational division, the fragmentation of sources, and different data standards. While the Pelagios method for linking data is simple enough for anyone to understand, to actually produce LOD still requires technical expertise. To address this challenge and lower the technological barrier to teachers, researchers and curators, Pelagios is supporting the development of a range of open-source tools that are freely available, easy to use, and provide solutions to shared needs/challenges. Co-created with international partners, these tools map onto the Network’s Activities:
- Annotation — The Pelagios Network has developed a number of tools for data curators, producers and researchers to enrich online collections or datasets without the need to learn code. These are: (i) Recogito Studio, an annotation platform for working on texts and images, which enables users to map places and link those references to other data on the Web. Find out more about this successor to Recogito at the Github repo and support forum). (ii) Annotorious, a javascript image annotation library for adding drawing, commenting and labelling functionality to a website; and (iii) Recogito.js, a javascript library for text annotation. A new version of Recogito is currently under development (December 2023). A related application, Numishare is an open source suite of applications for managing digital cultural heritage artefacts, with a particular focus on coins and medals.
- Visualisation – Peripleo is a JavaScript library that allows developers to draw on existing datasets formatted according to simple shared formats (e.g. Linked Places/GeoJSON, Linked Traces, TEI) to implement maps of things related to place. For a suite of examples, see The British Library’s Locating a National Collection project.
- Gazetteers — World Historical Gazetteer (WHG) is an open-source linked data platform aggregating contributions of place data drawn from historical sources. It provides features for a) gazetteer building by individuals and groups - including Wikidata reconciliation, b) for publication of datasets and annotated place collections, c) for pedagogical scenarios, and d) for data access by other systems via its API.
- Time — PeriodO is a public domain gazetteer of scholarly definitions of historical, art-historical, and archaeological periods. It eases the task of linking among datasets that define periods differently and helps scholars and students see where period definitions overlap or diverge.
These tools, built for easy use within a range of communities (from academic research and teaching to cultural heritage management and public outreach), are developed and sustained through Pelagios’s model of distributive resilience. Each tool addresses the challenges of sustainability and interoperability across domains and use-cases by focusing on core components within a modular framework to allow customization. To define the roadmap that informs the core and modular elements, the Network facilitates Partner collaboration which takes the form of contributing ideas and resources (funding, time). If you are interested in getting involved, please contact us: officers@pelagios.org or head directly to each of the developers listed below:
The Developers
- Rainer Simon is an independent software developer who specialises in the design of tools that help people explore, analyse and manage data more easily. He is the maintainer of the Annotorious and RecogitoJS open source libraries for image and text annotation, and the Peripleo library for spatial visualisation of humanities data.
- Jamie Folsom is a Partner in Performant Software Solutions, a digital humanities software development company, with expertise in developing open source software tools and platforms for research and teaching, and for working with text, images, data, maps, annotations and search.
- Gethin Rees is a lecturer at the Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London. He is interested in web mapping and helping people use Peripleo.
- Karl Grossner is a geographer and Digital Humanities research developer. He has served as co-instigator, technical director, and lead developer of World Historical Gazetteer (WHG) since its inception in 2017.
- Ethan Gruber is Director of Data Science, American Numismatic Society. Developer of the Numishare platform and various ANS projects built upon the platform (Online Coins of the Roman Empire, Hellenistic Royal Coinages, etc.) and chief software developer of Nomisma.org.
- Ryan Shaw is an Associate Professor at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He builds and maintains tools for the Periodo period gazetteer and is interested in the design and implementation of infrastructure for authoring, interlinking, querying and reasoning about linked scholarly data. See also https://github.com/rybesh
For more information about the origins of Pelagios and its development into a Network Association, you can read our special issue in the International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing.
