The development of a model for aggregating information about dispersed collections of ancient Greek pottery based on the concepts of linked open data to provide greater access to the collections and to allow new ways of analyzing the materials. 

Linked Open Greek Pottery: Kerameikos.org is an international effort to define the intellectual concepts of Archaic and Classical Greek pottery following the methodologies of Linked Open Data (LOD). These concepts include categories such as shapes, artists, styles, and production places. When linked externally to other LOD thesauri, such as the Getty Art & Architecture Thesaurus, Kerameikos.org allows for the normalization and aggregation of disparate museum and archaeological datasets into an information system that facilitates broader public access (e.g., Pelagios Commons). Beyond the definition of pottery concepts, following open web standards, Kerameikos.org will standardize and document an ontology and model for exchanging pottery data, provide easy-to-use interfaces to visualize geographic and quantitative distributions of Greek pottery, and publish a series of data manipulation web services enabling archaeologists and museum professionals to contribute data to this ecosystem.

The creation of the Gazetteer of the Ancient Near East, a geospatial index of archaeological sites and ancient historical places in the Near East, through the use of the Pleiades project software.

This grant will support the creation of the Gazetteer of the Ancient Near East. The project’s goal is to develop an authoritative, open access geospatial index of archaeological sites and historical places in the Near East, spanning some twelve thousand years (c. 12,500-600 BCE). The project is based on software developed by the Pleiades project (http://pleiades.stoa.org/), an extant and successful model for open access Web-based gazetteers. By developing a gazetteer of Ancient Near East places, researchers will be able to link events, persons, and archaeological evidence through shared notions of place and time. Thus, this project will help scholars to bring together disparate lines of historical and archaeological evidence. In doing so, this project represents critically needed infrastructure to catalyze research in the Ancient Near East and serves as an exemplar for open, collaborative scholarship.

Two joint workshops in collaboration with Heidelberg University (DFG request: 5,270 euros) to develop interoperability between the Epigraphische Datenbank Heidelberg (EDH), the Pleiades digital gazetteer, and the "born-digital" epigraphic publications conforming to the EpiDoc/TEI encoding standards.

The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (New York University), together with the Seminar fur Alte Geschichte und Epigraphik at Heidelberg University seek support for two three-day workshops. These events will bring together key staff members with a small cadre of external advisers to develop a comprehensive plan for interoperability between a growing suite of unique, essential resources: the Epigraphische Datenbank Heidelberg (EDH), the Pleiades digital gazetteer and "born-digital" epigraphic publications conforming to the EpiDoc/TEI encoding standards. It is our goal to establish both the fundamental prerequisites and a solid plan for incorporating EDH into an emerging, international cyberinfrastructure that will provide scholars and students alike with seamless access, visualization and relevance across multiple, discrete resources for ancient studies.

The continued development of an open-access digital gazetteer for Greek and Roman history with reusable open-source software that could be employed in other digital humanities publications.

Pleiades is an open-access digital gazetteer for Greek and Roman history. It builds on the NEH-supported Classical Atlas Project (CAP; 1988-2000), which produced the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World (Princeton, 2000). Pleiades lets scholars, students and enthusiasts worldwide freely use, create and share historical-geographic information. This proposal outlines phase 2, which shifts focus from design and development to community-building and content creation. We will attract and keep new users by publishing all legacy CAP materials (for 32,000+ historical places) and enhancing it with new material from several sources. We will further support research and publication through community-prioritized improvements to the user interface, expanded format alternatives and interoperation with other digital publications.