Dates and Places in Attestations; Sexing of Persons

[Scott Vanderbilt]

As with most epigraphic corpora, all inscriptions in RIB will have dates and places associated with them. This got me to thinking about whether lawd:Attestation triples ought not to have dates and places attached to them as members of the SNAP ontology, in addition to those attached to persons or names, albeit with a greater degree of precision than those values at the latter levels. Certainly the finer granularity of these dates and places would aid in the disambiguation process. Or so it would seem to me.

Also, with respect to sex of Persons, I see no provision in the current ontology for this information. Maybe not so useful for Greek and Latin names, but for many of the Germanic and Celtic names in RIB, sex is not so readily ascertainable merely from the morphology of the name itself.

In any event, as Gabby confirmed to me in another channel, there is nothing to prevent me from publishing these data in RIB's RDF, and SNAP can simply ignore them. But he thought the topic may be worthy of consideration for SNAP.

Thanks.

[Roueche, Charlotte]

Can I insert a particular sort of place? I'm just marking up inscriptions from the cemeteries at Teucheira; they have large rock-cut family tombs, with numerous funerary texts. If I find the same patronymic for two people in this setting, it is more significant than if I just find it somewhere else in the same cenmetery. Is there, therefore, a need for a relationship to >monument< as well as >place<?

Charlotte

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Professor Charlotte Roueché

Centre for Hellenic Studies

King's College

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[Gabriel Bodard]

To answer Scott's questions first:

1. I don't think snap:associatedPlace and snap:associatedDate are the
right properties for use with an attestation. "Associated Place" in
SNAP terms, means specifically, "this place is associated with this
person in some way, either because they're attested in a document that
was found there, because a prosopography says they're from there, they
have the placename as an epithet, or for some other reason that we're
not going to specify here." (Ditto, mutatis mutandis, associatedDate.)

That said, as Scott pointed out, the SNAP Cookbook recommends RDF for
a rather bare subset of yoru data, and you can of course encode much
more information in there than we'll want to know about; so if you use
some combination of CIDOC or FOAF or FRBRoo or whatever, they will
probably all have fairly standards ways of encoding place and date
information on bibliographic records, and you should use that if
appropriate.

2. Much the same for sex: SNAP don't currently recommend a specific
way for you to encode sex (let's not get into the ISO 5218:2004 fight
here!), but if you include that information in your larger
prosopographical data, I'm sure the standard ontologies will give you
a way to use that (and who knows, we may some day find a use for it).

To answer Charlotte's question:

3. Sure, I think you can consider the object of a snap:associatedPlace
property to be any place that has a name or a uri (and some monuments
have uris in Pleiades already--e.g. the Temple of Aphrodite in
Aphrodisias). My instinct is that the default value of "place" is a
city, so if your monument's uri is not a self-evident child of the
city's uri (as the Pleiades one would be), then maybe you should say
"this person is associated with Cyrene" as well as "this person is
associated with Tomb 62 in East Quarry VIII", for the most useful
grouping of people at the higher level. The choice is yours though;
both would be valid.

Hope this helps. (Happy for others' opinions too!)

Gabby

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Dr Gabriel BODARD
Researcher in Digital Epigraphy

Digital Humanities
King's College London
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