The
http://kerameikos.org scientific committee would like to invite presentations and discussion about linked data and pottery databases for a roundtable at the Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology conference (
http://caaconference.org/). The conference will be held in Siena, Italy from March 30 to April 3, 2015.
Below is the abstract:
Linked Open Data Applied to Pottery Databases
The indestructible nature of pottery has left an abundant amount of
material in the archaeological record. Vessels were formed into a
variety of shapes and sizes which inform the modern scholar about their
possible function and/or manufacturing process. In addition to being an
excellent tool for dating, pottery also enables researchers to
reconstruct the nature of a site and/or point to evidence of trade
between groups of people. Some types of pottery even exhibit additional
decoration that reflects the style of a certain period, the visual
language of a region, or scenes that offer information about religion,
daily life, literature, or contemporary events.
Ceramics exist in a variety of databases within museum collections,
archives, or as part of excavations or surveys. The basic ideas
underlying the classification of ancient Mediterranean pottery (e.g.,
shape, production place, painter, potter, iconography, etc.) are shared
across languages, but the aggregation of data on a massive scale cannot
be undertaken without standardised identifiers and ontologies.
Presently, there are no firm standards for representing and/or
publishing pottery datasets on the web, and, for this reason, it is
difficult to query across multiple collections for research purposes.
Linked Open Data (LOD) can play a vital role in ameliorating some of
these technical challenges. Building on the methodologies developed for
Nomisma.org, a collaborative enterprise that seeks to define the
intellectual concepts of numismatics, we have undertaken a new project,
Kerameikos.org, that likewise will apply these technologies to pottery.
Kerameikos.org, a thesaurus that seeks to define pottery concepts with
URIs and RDF, will enable those publishing ceramic data to encode their
information in an accessible manner, following emerging web standards in
the cultural heritage community.
This roundtable follows the introduction of Kerameikos.org during the
2014 CAA (Gruber and Smith). Since that time we have selected a
Scientific Committee comprised of experts relevant to the current
project content, including information technologists and pottery
specialists. Currently, we seek to solicit feedback from the informatics
and ceramics communities on our future direction. While Kerameikos.org
is focused currently on Greek black- and red-figure ‘vases’, we welcome
presentations and discussions of digital projects in other fields of
pottery studies. It is our goal to design a tool whose application can
meet the needs of archaeologists working in museums, the field, or
archives. We hope that this roundtable will encourage further dialogue
and collaboration.
Ethan Gruber, American Numismatic Society
Renee Gondek, George Washington University
Tyler Jo Smith, University of Virginia
*****
. Please see the CAA call for papers (
) for more information about the conference and procedures for participating in the roundtable.