Glossary¶
- Attestation
One piece of evidence: a statement that a source, for a date, gives a name, location, type, relation or other fact for a place. Each evidence row of the spreadsheets becomes one attestation.
- Certainty
How sure whoever recorded a statement is of it, from 0 to 1. It reflects the evidence: better evidence could change it. Not the same as fuzziness. Where a dataset gives certainty in words, the certainty level records the word (‘Certain’, ‘LessCertain’, ‘Uncertain’) instead of a number. Certainty is never the source’s own hedging: that is its stance.
- Citation
One attestation’s use of one source, with the locator saying where in the source the evidence is, and, where known, why the source is cited: as the evidence, as a source of data, as related reading.
- CSVW (CSV on the Web)
The W3C standard used to describe the spreadsheet tables: their columns, allowed values, how they refer to one another and how rows become RDF.
- Date, from, to
Date is the date as the source gives it, or “undated”, kept in the source’s own words. From and to are the earliest and latest years or days it can mean, written with at least four-digit years.
- Denial
A source’s statement that something was not so, such as “no market here”. It is recorded as an attestation marked as denied, about the real place, so that nothing that never existed has to be invented.
- Fuzziness
The sense in which something genuinely has no sharp edge, such as “the Levant” or a gradual change of rule. It is a property of the thing, not of our knowledge of it, so it is different from certainty.
- Headword
The form of a name under which an editor or survey files an entry. An editorial decision rather than a reading.
- Ibid. (ibidem), idem
“The same (source) as before”. Where an editor has worked out which source was meant, the attribution is inferred.
- JSON-LD
A way of writing linked data as JSON. PLATO’s JSON-LD context turns a JSON document into RDF.
- Locator
Where in a source the evidence is: a page, folio, column or entry number.
- Normalised form
A spelling made up for searching or matching, attested by no source.
- Place
In this guide, as in everyday speech, somewhere a source talks about. PLATO gives the word no special meaning: its own term is SpatialEntity. The spreadsheets’ places sheet holds SpatialEntities.
- RDF
The W3C standard data model for linked data, in which the PLATO ontology is written.
- Source
A document, map, book or dataset that evidence comes from. A source can be derived from another, as a copy or an edition. It can carry its licence, the licence of the copy you cite, so that anyone using your data can see which sources may be reused.
- Stance
How firmly a source itself says something. Most sources simply assert, but some pass a claim on without vouching for it (“it is said”), hedge it, or raise it and leave it undecided. That is recorded as the source’s stance, separately from how sure you are: you can be quite certain that a source hedged. Leaving a thing undecided is not denying it (see Denial).
- SpatialEntity
PLATO’s term for the thing attestations are about. Many SpatialEntities are places in the everyday sense; others are routes, networks, administrative units or the regions historical periods apply to. What kind each is comes from type attestations.
- temPlato
PLATO’s spreadsheet template: eight linked sheets, as an Excel workbook or as CSV files, for putting data into PLATO’s shape without software.
- URI
A web address used as a permanent identifier, such as
https://www.geonames.org/2654675/.