Creation of a digital collection of fragmentary writings of Greek historians and development of a virtual research environment for Greco-Roman antiquity using grid technologies that would be broadly applicable to other humanities disciplines.

[A grid is a computing architecture that coordinates large numbers of computers and data to act as a single large computer. It enables individuals or institutions grouped as virtual organizations to dynamically share computational resources.] Philogrid, a collaboration of the Perseus Digital Library (DL) at Tufts University in the United States and the Internet Centre at Imperial College London in the United Kingdom, proposes to create an expandable, grid-enabled, Web service-driven virtual research environment for Greco-Roman antiquity based initially upon open source texts and services from the Perseus DL. First, we will add to the Perseus DL the writings of Greek historians that exist only in fragmentary form. This task goes beyond simple data entry: we will create the first major digital collection of fragmentary authors designed from the start to interact with multiple source editions. Second, we will create a repository of philological data about the Greco-Roman world seeded with twenty years' worth of Perseus materials. The objects that we create will not only include books but every labeled object within each logical document. Third, we will convert the workflow that has evolved over the past ten years to process textual materials in Perseus into a grid-enabled workflow based on Web services that can be applied to and customized for many collections. Although this project will concentrate on the classics collections in the Perseus DL, the new workflows will also process non-classical Perseus content, and will thus from the start demonstrate their generality. The development process will follow a strategy already successfully employed in e-Science projects at the Imperial College Internet Centre. It will consist of conversion of the Perseus workflow and tools into a Web service environment, in which the Perseus workflow is analyzed into steps, each of which is published as a Web service with a configurable API. A workflow mirroring the Perseus workflow will then be composed and fine-tuned using model data from Perseus and sample data from the digitization within the current scope of this project. The results of this project would be freely accessible on the Web.