LOD-People: Quick example from the excavations at Kenchreai

[Sebastian Heath]

Greetings All,

 I've been happy to follow the notice of the Linked Pasts activity and glad to see it getting underway. As happens, I had a conflict for the kickoff. And it's also the case that I'm mostly an interested observer who will welcome any further discussion of best practices in how to represent ancient people online.

 I can point to practical work. Along with my colleague Joseph Rife, I edit/design/add data to the Kenchreai Archaeological Archive (KAA). I won't burden you with too much intro. Kencreai is a site in Greece with many decades of archaeological work, KAA uses RDF to define entities and relationships between them. More to say but those two statements are at the core of KAA.

 We have coins and other objects that depict or are otherwise associated with people. You can go to http://kenchreai.org/kaa/historical-persons to see a simple list. And if you click on "show more links", wait a few seconds for a bit rdf inferencing to happen on our small server, and then scroll down, you'll see a fair number of coins and a lamp that refer to those people.

 The descriptions of individuals are spare to say the least. That's really just a matter of data entry. At this point we are mainly focussed on the relationships of objects to these people. But we do sometimes link to Wikidata (especially for recently created entries) and more frequently to nomisma.org . 

 This is all "work in progress" but can also be called "in production" in that everything goes into our triplestore and is available for all the world to see right as we do the data entry.

 All best,

 -Sebastian