Kerameikos.org editor extended to support Getty ULAN linking

This morning, the Getty Museum announced the release of the Union List of Artist Names (ULAN) into their new linked open data publication system. As soon as I had a few minutes free, I updated the Getty SPARQL lookup mechanism in the Kerameikos.org editor to extend the XForms component for querying the ULAN to link painters and potters in Kerameikos to Getty URIs. The updates were pushed into production in less than five minutes.

Now that lookups to the Getty and British Museum SPARQL endpoints and the VIAF RSS feed are available for people, I was able to create the id for Kleitias in about a minute (having also extracted preferred labels from dbpedia).

For a bit more information about how this works under the hood:

If you are editing a foaf:Person concept, the link to the Getty ULAN lookup will appear under "Import" in the right sidebar. If a preferred label has already been empty, clicking the Getty ULAN link will automatically query with the provided preferred label, otherwise you can enter your own string. The query string is passed into an XForms instance containing the following SPARQL query:

PREFIX gvp: <http://vocab.getty.edu/ontology#>
PREFIX skos: <http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#>
PREFIX luc: <http://www.ontotext.com/owlim/lucene#>
PREFIX ulan: <http://vocab.getty.edu/ulan/>
SELECT ?c ?label ?scopeNote WHERE {
?c a gvp:PersonConcept; skos:inScheme ulan: ;
gvp:prefLabelGVP/xl:literalForm ?label ;
skos:scopeNote/rdf:value ?scopeNote ;
luc:term "SEARCH_QUERY"} LIMIT 25

The luc:term is the property used to query a Lucene index. The query is sent to the Getty SPARQL endpoint via an XForms submission, and the XML response is then represented graphically as a table of results with checkboxes to include as skos:exactMatch. The checkboxes are not really necessary for the Getty lookup, as we can probably assume there is one URI per entity, but the mechanism is carried over from the VIAF lookup. VIAF has not fully disambiguated entities across all authority records.

Kerameikos updates

Ontology

After much discussion of the Kerameikos list, we are moving forward with the initial proposed set of classes in the ontology, plus one: ProductionPlace. A production place in Kerameikos is a theoretical concept. It may be as specific as a workshop, if it can be ascertained, or as generic as a large region, such as West Greece. Presently, there are four pottery-specific classes in the ontology besides ProductionPlace: Shape, Style, Technique, and Ware (still under debate). There are a variety of classes borrowed from CIDOC-CRM, such as E4_Period.

The complexity of instances in the Kerameikos id namespace is variable. Shapes and places are relatively simple. Techniques, styles, and periods can be built from the ground up--starting simply, but with the potential for greater complexity. For example, the Black Figure technique is invariably composed incision and silhouette, also techniques. A style, like Marine Style, has a single identifier in a system like the Getty AAT, but is a combination of concepts: it is a particular decorative style from a particular place (Crete), culture (Minoan), and period (Late Minoan), which falls in the Bronze Age (which has vague absolute dates attached).

The Kerameikos editor allows for the creation and linking of these concepts on a simple level, but I am to extend the editing functionality to enable more complex typologies.

Concept Schemes

Previously, the Kerameikos id namespace (http://kerameikos.org/id/) was the landing page for browsing the collection, but it now resolves to a skos:ConceptScheme. It is possible to use content negotiation to get this scheme in RDF/XML, Turtle, and JSON-LD. The browse page has been moved to the browse/ pipeline.

The introduction of concept schemes into Kerameikos.org will enable the next iteration of ids. We plan to begin attributing concepts in the id namespace to bibliographic references, i. e., to link painters and potters to references that identify them. This means that in the near future, we'll introduce a 'work' concept scheme. We'll be able to link ids to Worldcat or JSTOR URIs. In the case of Worldcat, at least, we'll be able to extract bibliographic and authority RDF metadata from OCLC. The attribution of ids is absolutely necessary for the project, and will likely open up other avenues of inquiry. In the future, one might get a list of all painters identified by John Beazley or identify all vases found in Vulci that were published in 1890-1900.

Data Dumps

Data dumps are linked from the home page. The Kerameikos.org data are available in RDF/XML, JSON-LD, and Turtle. The Pelagios dump is now available as well, although only a few production places are linked to Pleiades.

Roman cooking ware terminology, function, real use: problems and solutions for standardization, recording, sharing

Submitted by Laura Banducci, Carleton University

Kerameikos.org has focused thus far on creating and connecting data about Greek painted pottery; it could be extended to serve usefully in Roman pottery studies. In Roman pottery there are similar complexities of language differences (within ancient languages, and among modern researchers) which create obstacles to knowledge sharing. In the case of some wares, namely cooking vessels, we also have substantial cultural differences which befuddle attempts to associate like form with like form. For example, a casserole in North American English can mean two very differently-shaped vessels. Then, in Italian the idea of a casseruola only applies to one of these English forms. The term “casserole” itself has a particular food associated with it. There are cooking jars versus cooking bells, pans, versus trays, etc. The examples of this are myriad.

Furthermore, the understanding of function and use is quite a significant facet in many research questions regarding cooking wares, since food and cooking can touch upon technology, environment, and cultural identity. Yet function and use are typically understood from the observation of form. These formal definitions are wrapped not only in our own cultural biases but also frequently in the connections we have drawn between vessels named in ancient texts and artefacts (Bats 1988). Yet, scrutiny of Latin sources reveals that “patinae” “ollae” or “testa” are used in inconsistent ways (Donnelly Forthcoming 2015), thus their strict association with certain shapes, recipes or food groups is inappropriate.

This paper elucidates these problems and proposes several solutions for the roundtable. I suggest a standardized way of choosing terms for shape using specific physical descriptions. Next, a major way to contribute to the understanding of both intended function of these vessels and their actual ancient use, is to add the study of use-wear analysis to ceramic study as a standard practice. Use-wear analysis or “ceramic alteration analysis” (Skibo 1992) is increasingly acknowledged to be the next logical step in the close study of utilitarian vessels (Lis 2010; Pena 2014; Swift 2014; Banducci 2014). Traces of wear can be combined with observations made about form to determine use.  This type of analysis also has the potential to reveal multi-functionality, including both contemporaneous multiple uses of one object as well as the use of an object for its non-intended purpose. The difficulty has been in creating a recording system to observe essentially qualitative data (the observation of different types of wear) in a quantitative way. The recording system is comprehensive enough to admit wide variability while also sufficiently well-defined to permit focused analyses of characteristics within and across the dataset. This system was inspired in part by the framework used by conservators completing surveys of the conditions of artefacts in museum collections. Databases of wear and morphology have the potential to be scalable to many different types of archaeological vessels – tracking function, use, use-life. Disseminating systematic ways of observing and recording this information requires a robust digital platform like kerameikos.org.