BAtlas ID update: add map 73, revise captions for rivers, islands and island groups

I have just updated the XML files providing Barrington Atlas IDs and associated information (background). The following additions and changes were made

  • IDs added for Map 73 (Ammon)
  • All files refreshed so that alternative captions for rivers, islands and island groups with multiple names all carry the appropriate formulaic postfix expression (fl., Ins. Inss.); no alias IDs have been changed; no geogname elements have been changed; no features have been added or removed
Copies of the prior versions are available for reference in an appropriately-dated subdirectory, e.g.: http://atlantides.org/batlas/2007-07-11/

Barrington Atlas IDs

Update: follow the batlasids tag trail for follow-ups.

Back in February, I blogged about clean URLs and feed aggregation. In March, we learned about the ORE specification for mapping resource aggregations in Atom XML, just as we were gearing up to start work on the Concordia project, with support from the US National Endowment for the Humanities and the UK Joint Information Services Committee.

Our first workshop was held in May. One of the major outcomes was a to-do for me: provide a set of stable identifiers for every citable geographic feature in the Barrington Atlas so collaborators could start publishing resource maps and building interoperation services right away, without waiting for the full build-out of Pleiades content (which will take some time).

The first fruits can be downloaded at: http://atlantides.org/batlas/ . All content under that URL is licensed cc-by. Back versions are in dated subdirectories.

There you'll find XML files for 3 of the Atlas maps (22, 38 and 65). There's only one feature class for which we don't provide IDs: roads. More on why not another time. I'll be adding files for more of the maps as quickly as I can, beginning with Egypt and the north African coast west from the Nile delta to Tripolitania (the Concordia "study area"). Our aim is full coverage for the Atlas within the next few months.

What do you get in the files?


IDs (aka aliases) for every citable geographic feature in the Barrington Atlas. For example:
  • BAtlas 65 G2 Ouasada = ouasada-65-g2
If you combine one of these aliases with the "uribase" also listed in the file (http://atlantides.org/batlas/) you get a Uniform Resource Identifier for that feature (this should answer Sebastian Heath's question).

For features with multiple names, we provide multiple aliases to facilitate ease of use for our collaborators. For example, for BAtlas 65 A2 Aphrodisias/Ninoe, any of the following aliases are valid:
  • aphrodisias-ninoe-65-a2
  • aphrodisias-65-a2
  • ninoe-65-a2
Features labeled in the Atlas with only a number are also handled. For example, BAtlas 38 C1 no. 9 is glossed in the Map-by-Map Directory with the location description (modern names): "Siret el-Giamel/Gasrin di Beida". So, we produce the following aliases, all valid:
  • (9)-38-c1
  • (9)-siret-el-giamel-gasrin-di-beida-38-c1
  • (9)-siret-el-giamel-38-c1
  • (9)-gasrin-di-beida-38-c1
Most unlabeled historical/cultural features also get identifiers. For example:
  • Unnamed aqueduct at Laodicea ad Lycum in BAtlas 65 B2 = aqueduct-laodicea-ad-lycum-65-b2
  • Unnamed bridge at Valerian in BAtlas 22 B5 = bridge-valeriana-22-b5
Unlocated toponyms and false names (appearing only in the Map-by-Map Directory) get treated like this:
  • BAtlas 22 unlocated Acrae = acrae-22-unlocated
  • BAtlas 38 unlocated Ampelos/Ampelontes? = ampelos-ampelontes-38-unlocated = ampelos-38-unlocated = ampelontes-38-unlocated
  • BAtlas 65 false name ‘Itoana’ = itoana-65-false
The XML files also provide associated lists of geographic names, formatted BAtlas citations and other information useful for searching, indexing and correlating these entries with your own existing datasets. What you don't get is coordinates. That's what the Pleiades legacy data conversion work is for, and it's a slower and more expensive process.

Read on to find out how you can start using these identifiers now, and get links to the corresponding Pleiades data automatically as it comes on line over time.

Why do we need these identifiers?


Separate digital projects would like to be able to refer unambiguously to any ancient Greek or Roman geographic feature using a consistent, machine-actionable scheme. The Barrington Atlas is a stable, published resource that can provide this basis if we construct the corresponding IDs.

Even without coordinates, other projects can begin to interoperate with each other immediately, as long as they have a common scheme of identifiers. After using BAtlas URIs to normalize, control or annotate their geographic description, they can publish services or crosswalks that provide links for the relationships within and between their datasets. For example, for each record in a database of coins you might like links to all the other coins minted by the same city, or to digital versions (in other databases) of papyrus documents and inscriptions found at that site.

Moreover, we would like other projects to start using a consistent identifier scheme now, so that as Pleiades adds content we can build more interoperation around it (e.g., dynamic mapping, coordinate lookup, proximity search across multiple collections). To that end, Pleiades will provide redirects (303 see other) from Barrington Atlas URIs (following the scheme described here) as follows:
  • If a corresponding entry exists in Pleiades, the web browser will be redirected to that Pleiades page automatically
  • If there is not yet a corresponding entry in Pleiades, the web browser will be redirected to an HTML page providing a full human-readable citation of the Atlas, as well as information about this service
So, for example:
  • http://atlantides.org/batlas/aphrodisias-ninoe-65-a2 will re-direct to http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/638753
  • http://atlantides.org/batlas/vlahii-22-e4 will re-direct to http://atlantides.org/batlas/vlahii-22-e4.html until there is a corresponding Pleiades record
The HTML landing pages for non-Pleiades redirects are not in place yet, but we're working on it. We'll post again when that's working.

Why URIs for a discretely citable feature in a real-world, printed atlas?

I'll let Bizer, Cyganiak and Heath explain the naming of resources with URI references. In the parlance of "Linked Data on the Web," Barrington Atlas features are "non-information resources"; that is, they are non-digital/real-world discrete entities about which web authors and services may want to make assertions or around which to perform operations. What we are doing is creating a stable system for identifying and citing these resources so that those assertions and operations can be automated using standards-compliant web mechanisms and applications. The HTML pages to which web browsers will be automatically redirected constitute "information resources" that describe the "non-information resources" identified by the original URIs.

How

If I get a comment box full of requests for a blow-by-blow description of the algorithm, I'll post something on that. If you're really curious and energetic, have a look at the code. It's intended mostly for short-term, internal use, so it's not marvelously documented. Yes, it's a hack.

One of the big headaches was deciding how to decompose the complex labels into simple, clean ASCII strings that can be legal URL components. Sean blogged about that, and wrote some code to do it, shortly after the workshop.

Credit where credit is due

Sean and I had a lot of help from the workshop participants (Ben Armintor, Gabriel Bodard, Hugh Cayless, Sebastian Heath, Tim Libert, Sebastian Rahtz and Charlotte Roueché) in sorting out what to do here. Older, substantive conversations that informed this process (with these folks and others; notably Rob Chavez, Greg Crane, Ruth Mostern, Dan Pett, Ross Scaife†, Patrick Sims-Williams, Linda Smith and Neel Smith) go back as far as 2000, shortly after the Atlas was published.

Many thanks to all!

Examples
in the Wild


Sebastian Rahtz has already mocked up an example service for the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names. It takes a BAtlas alias and returns you all the name records in their system that are associated with the corresponding place. So, for example:
  • http://clas-lgpn2.class.ox.ac.uk/batlas/aloros-50-b3
This is just one of several services that LGPN is developing. See the LGPN web services page, as well as the LGPN presentation to the Digital Classicist Seminar in London last month.

Sebastian Heath, for some time, has been incorporating Pleiades identifiers into the database records of the American Numismatic Society. He has blogged about that work in the context of Concordia.

Do you have an application? Let me know!

EpiDoc in Bologna

Last week I had the opportunity to give a seminar on EpiDoc as a guest of Prof. Carla Salvaterra and the Department of Ancient History at the University of Bologna. We titled the session "Digital Publishing with EpiDoc: Epigraphy, Papyrology, Interoperability."

I had a delightful time, and greatly appreciated extended discussion with the faculty and students who participated.

For what they're worth, I've posted my slides:

Open Library API, Bibo Ontology and Digital Bibliographies

I bet we're going to want to fiddle with the Open Library API and the Bibo Ontology in the context of the Pleiades bibliography application (and some others we're thinking about, like a next-generation Checklist of Editions for papyri and the like).

  • Seek and get digital books from the Open Library.
  • Use Bibo in other-than-html serializations of the underlying MODS records, and maybe even microformatishly in the HTML version. (We already use COinS -- for interop with Zotero -- but it's lossy, ungainly and suboptimally human-readable).
Thanks to Dave Pattern (via planet code4lib) for the pointer to the OA API).

Downtime

Update (0855 EDT, 13 May): at present the server is down; individual services, beginning with Concordia, will come back up as they are reinstalled over the course of today.

It's time for a server operating system upgrade, so atlantides.org will be down today (6 May 2008), between noon and 8:00 p.m. U.S. Eastern time (GMT/UTC + 5). The length of the outage is likely to be shorter than this window. The Atlantides feed aggregators, as well as the Pleiades and Concordia development environments will be inaccessible during this upgrade. pleiades.stoa.org will remain up and accessible throughout.

Sharing the road

So, you find yourself in a free-wifi coffeeshop (or similar venue), where you're sharing bandwidth with others. You have a bunch of really big files that you need to transfer to a remote server so collaborators can get at them. You know that upload speed at your location is throttled pretty aggressively (my usual haunt has Bell South DSL, and I've never seen a big upload average higher than 48Kbps). So, it's likely that if you blast that stuff out it'll slow everybody in the venue (I tried. It did.).

This uses all the bandwidth it can get:

scp huge-file.zip myname@myserver.org:
This is more neighbor-friendly (my max upload speed is set to 10Kbps):
rsync --bwlimit=10 -e ssh huge-file.zip myname@myserver.org:
I really don't want to get thrown out of here ...

La construcción de una identidad provincial

José-Vidal Madruga sent me a notice about this interesting conference, set for 8-10 May in Sevilla. GB has already blogged it at Current Epigraphy, but the announcement I received has names of papers, so ...

C O N G R E S O

La construcción de una identidad provincial La experiencia hispana

8-10 mayo 2008

Coordinación : A. Caballos Rufino Universidad de Sevilla S. Lefebvre Université de Bourgogne

Organisation : Universidad de Sevilla | Casa de Velázquez

Entidades colaboradoras: Museo Arqueológico de Sevilla. Consejería de Cultura. Junta de Andalucía Universidad de Sevilla. Facultad de Geografía e Historia Universidad de Sevilla. Departamento de Historia Antigua

Jueves 8 mayo

Aula Carriazo - Facultad de Geografía e Historia - Universidad de Sevilla

17 h 00 - 20 h 00

Presentación A. Caballos Universidad de Sevilla y S. Lefebvre Université de Bourgogne

P. Le Roux Université de Paris 13-Villetaneuse Introduction: identité civique, identité provinciale

F. Pina Polo Universidad de Zaragoza Etnia, ciudad y provincia en la Hispania republicana

M. Navarro Caballero CNRS-Centre Ausonius-Université de Bordeaux III Référents identitaires. Groupe, culture et territoire. L'identité celtibère dans le cadre de la province de Citérieure

Coloquio

Viernes 9 mayo

Aula Carriazo - Facultad de Geografía e Historia - Universidad de Sevilla

09 h 30 - 13 h 30

S. Lefebvre Université de Bourgogne Onomastique et identité provinciale: le cas de "Lusitanus"

S. Marcos Université de Paris I Espace géographique, espace politique : La frontière provinciale, une limite déterminante ?

F. J. Navarro Santana Universidad de Navarra El gobierno de la Tarraconense y la identidad de la provincia

R. Haensch Kommission für Alte Geschichte und Epigraphik, Munich Das Verhältnis von Statthaltern zu ihrer Provinz

M. Gordón Peral Universidad de Sevilla Estructura funcional y vertebración provincial: el conventus Hispalensis

E. Melchor Gil Universidad de Córdoba Elites supralocales en la Bética: entre la civitas y la provincia

Coloquio

17 h 30 - 20 h 00

G. Chic García Universidad de Sevilla Los elementos económicos en la integración de la provincia Bética

A. Dardenay Université de Toulouse II-Le Mirail La diffusion iconographique des mythes fondateurs de Rome dans l'Occident romain : spécificités hispaniques

A. A. Reyes Domínguez Universidad de Sevilla La imagen como soporte de difusión ideológica en la provincia

M. Hainzmann Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz 'Nationale' Identität im Lichte des Götterkultes. Das Beispiel Noricums

Coloquio

Sábado 10 mayo

Salón de Actos - Museo Arqueológico de Sevilla

09 h 30 - 14 h 00

J. C. Saquete Chamizo Universidad de Sevilla La religión como elemento de integración de las provincias y los provinciales hispanos en época imperial

L. Brassous Université de Pau Les capitales des provinces d'Hispanie après la réforme administrative de Dioclétien

F. Wulff Alonso Universidad de Málaga Hablando de identidades. Debates teóricos y reflexiones historiográficas entre la República y el Imperio

Coloquio

Sesión de Clausura

F. Beltrán Lloris Universidad de Zaragoza "...et sola omnium provinciarum uires suas postquam uicta est intellexit": Hispania como referente identitario en el mundo romano"

Visita al Museo Arqueológico de Sevilla

CVZ Casa de Velázquez | c/ Paul Guinard, 3 | 28040 Madrid | España | e-mail Tlf: (00 34) 914 551 580 Flora Lorente | Fax: (00 34) 914 551 597

New Planets: Concordia and Pleiades

Neither Pleiades nor Concordia has its own news blog; and I hope you'll forgive the fact that the team members were reluctant to create same, since some of us already blog in multiple places. The solution? Aggregate and filter our regular blog posts into project-specific streams. So today I have added to the Atlantides system the following:

  • Concordia: News and Views (html | rss)
  • Pleiades: News and Views (html | rss)
Hat-tip to the regexp_sifter.py filter in Sam Ruby's Venus.