Pelagios 3 is Go!

[Leif Isaksen]

Dear all

It's been a bit a quiet on the Pelagios mailing list but beneath the
surface seismic-scale developments have been taking place. Most of
these are related to the launch of chapter 3 in our ongoing saga:

http://pelagios-project.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/pelagios-chapter-3-early-geospatial.html

This is a bit of a lengthy email to fill everyone in on what's been
going on so that we're all in the loop. If you have any questions of
comments do get back to us, either on or off-list as appropriate.

- First a quick reminder that the next phase of the project will put
an emphasis on Early Geospatial Documents - i.e. texts and images that
describe the world (or large parts of it) up to 1492, including not
only antiquity but also the Christian, Islamic and Chinese traditions.
It has been very kindly funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

- A significant shift in our MO will be for the Pelagios team to do a
lot of the annotation. This is not a shift in philosophy, but rather
an attempt to create a critical mass of content in these later periods
(as well as supplement the earlier ones) as a means of encouraging new
partners to bring in further content. As ever, we are very keen to
bring in new partners in for Antiquity, and indeed the Heidelberg
Epigraphic Database has just contributed a huge new set of
annotations.

- A further part of the project will be develop improved interfaces
for search and analysis - we would very much welcome your ideas on
this. We'd like to make the Pelagios API as user-friendly as possible
so that casual users and committed researchers alike can really start
to understand the benefits of Linked Open Data.

- A great deal of the work will be undertaken by Rainer Simon, and our
new team-member Pau de Soto (take a bow, Pau!) who will be joining us
full time from January until the end of the project in September 2015.
Elton and Leif will also be directly working on the project for one
day each week.

- In addition to Pau, there are a lot more new faces to welcome (say
hello, everyone!). We'd like everyone to introduce themselves at some
point, either on the mailing list or with a blog post (as has become a
venerable Pelagios tradition). In the meantime, we should mention that
the China Historical GIS (Harvard) and PastPlace (University of
Portsmouth) will be bringing new gazetteer functionality to supplement
that provided by Pleiades, The British Library will be supporting us
in a range of ways, including annotation hosting, and we will be
getting specialist guidance on particular periods from Tony Campbell,
Ramon Pujades, Martin Foys, Kimberly Kowal, Kurt Franz, Lex Berman and
the many others who have been kind enough to sit on our Advisory
Board: Peter Barber, Peter Bol, Greg Crane, Catherine Delano-Smith,
Adam Farquhar, Alfred Hiatt, Samuel J. Huskey, Ramon Pujades, Yossef
Rapoport, Robert Sanderson, Emilie Savage-Smith,and Humphrey Southall

- We had a successful kick-off meeting in London last Monday, followed
by a very positive meeting with Mellon and our first workpackage
workshop on gazetteers at ISAW in New York at the end of the week.
This has set us up with our best foot forward. Rainer has already put
up a wiki of the outcomes of the gazetteer meeting and we'd encourage
anyone with an interest in this aspect of the project to take a look
at it and add comments.

https://github.com/pelagios/pelagios-cookbook/wiki/Pelagios-Gazetteer-Interconnection-Format

- Jess Ogden has also very kindly revamped the look and feel of our
website, and we've also moved things around a bit. Please do take a
look and let us know what you think. In particular we are aware that
we acknowledge institutional partners on our partner page, but not
individual contributors without institutional affiliation. If anyone
has proposals for how best to do that (especially the individuals
concerned) we'd be glad to hear them.

http://pelagios-project.blogspot.co.uk/p/partners.html

- And finally, we've had a very positive piece in The Guardian:

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/sep/18/researchers-build-google-earth-project-for-the-ancient-world

Thanks to all of you, old friends and new, who have got us to such a
good place. We have a wonderful couple of years ahead.

Best wishes

Leif, Elton, Rainer and Pau

[Daniel Pett]

Fantastic to read about the developments. Well done to all.

Dan

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DEJ Pett
ICT Adviser British Museum