Transformation and Growth of The Treasury of Lives Encyclopedia: Creating Access to the People and Places of Tibet, Inner Asia and the Himalayan Region

FAIN: PW-269333-20

Treasury of Lives, Inc. (New York, NY 10011-5510)
Alexander Patten Gardner (Project Director: July 2019 to April 2025)

Expansion and development of an online resource that documents the history, people, and places of Tibet, Inner Asia, and the Himalayan region.  The project would expand the technical infrastructure of the current resource to include linked open data and would expand content by adding new biographies and geographic data.

The Treasury of Lives, an online encyclopedia of Tibet, Inner Asia and the Himalayan Region, will implement a major expansion of encyclopedia content and transition from traditional relational database tables to a Resource Description Framework (RDF) knowledge graph capable of supporting semantic queries. The Treasury of Lives will add 100 new biographies of significant twentieth century Tibetan figures and 100 geographic place description entries with dynamic mapping, as well as related family and social roles content, to the actively growing resource. This content development will coincide with the development of a data model and ontology for people and places of Tibet, all in preparation for the transition to a triple-store database and website redevelopment that will fully implement the principles of Linked Open Data (LOD).