Syriac persons in linked data with OAC

In this post, I'm trying to get my head around how to use the Open Annotation Data Model express assertions about a historical person, with reference to other resources on the web, and to do so in a way that tracks the provenance of those persons.

So, our digital programs team at ISAW presently has the privilege of working with the fantastic group of folks behind the Syriac Reference Portal Project, headed by David Michelson at Vanderbilt University. We're presently trying to sort out how we're going to aggregate and store assertions about various entities and resources of interest for Syriac studies (like people, places, manuscripts, literary works, and so on). Since these assertions are going to be coming from a variety of collaborating projects, and we're going to want to link to data resources served to the web by those collaborating projects, we need to keep track of the provenance of these assertions. And of course we want all of this to be as web-friendly and open as possible.

So, we started out by ignoring the provenance issue and produced a bunch of example triples around a single historical personage, Ephrem the Syrian (we're minting our own URIs to identify these folks):

; a schema:Person , foaf:Person ;
  owl:sameAs  ;
  schema:name "ܐܦܪܝܡ"@syc ,
    "Ephrem"@en ,
    schema:description "4th-century author and deacon, who spent most of his life in Nisibis. Recognized as a doctor and saint in several Christian traditions." .


So far, so good, since all of this information is going to be asserted by the central SRP project team. But what if we wanted to add information about name forms that are asserted by other partners (and give credit where credit is due)?

Does the following additional triples do the trick?


Pleiades Hackday: Improving Descriptions

A Pleiades hack day is now underway in the Pleiades IRC channel. We've decided to focus on cleaning up descriptions for Pleiades place resources on the island of Sardinia. The following query gives you most of the Pleiades content for Sardinia and Corsica:

http://tinyurl.com/aotxaum

Here's our process:


  1. Pick a place to improve
  2. Drop the title and URL into the IRC channel, so everyone knows you're working on it
  3. Check out a working copy of the place
  4. In your working copy, write a better description and connect the place to the place resource for the island you're working on.
  5. Submit for review
  6. Ping paregorios or servilius_ahala in IRC to get it reviewed and published

We're also building an FAQ on the subject of "What Makes a Good Pleiades Description?".