More DOIs minted for the intellectual contributions to Kerameikos

Sherry Lake at the University of Virginia Library minted four new DOIs for the intellectual contributions made by four Kerameikos.org editors to the recent batch of Greek pottery shapes published last Thursday. Prior to now, only one DOI had been minted (for myself -- click the link for technical details about SPARQL -> DataCite XML), based on the IDs manually edited for our initial prototype, which launched in 2014. These recent four are derived from the spreadsheet import mechanism, where we have adapted the Nomisma.org Provenance Ontology model for linking editors to Google Spreadsheets uploaded into the system and transformed into RDF.

• https://doi.org/10.25888/tjsmith
• https://doi.org/10.25888/rgondek
• https://doi.org/10.25888/nolya
• https://doi.org/10.25888/abradford

We expect to issue several more DOIs in the next few weeks for collaborators working on German and Greek translations to shapes labels and definitions.

Archaic and Classical Greek shapes published to Kerameikos

About 120 shapes have been created or updated in Kerameikos.org through the spreadsheet import mechanism that transforms Google spreadsheets into SKOS-based RDF following the same principles in Nomisma.org.

These new concepts were initially derived from a CSV download of shapes available in the Beazley Archive Pottery Database at Oxford University. After some initial cleanup to remove items we decided were not in-scope for this phase of the project (Archaic and Classical Greek concepts) or represented vase fragments rather than distinct intellectual concepts, the spreadsheet went through a round of OpenRefine reconciliation in order to link these new Kerameikos URIs to as many Getty Art & Architecture Thesaurus, British Museum, and Wikidata URIs as possible. Additionally, we included the Greek plural (with the lexinfo ontology), when applicable. The shapes are linked hierarchically with skos:broader.

Nearly all of the shapes should have at least one reference to a Zenon bibliographic URI, the catalog of the German Archaeological Institute. Some extremely rare shapes may have several Zenon references.

The definitions were authored by UVA Classical Archaeology graduate students, Abigail Bradford and Najee Olya.

I will be requesting the DataCite metadata to be submitted by the University of Virginia Library tomorrow in order to mint DOIs for each editor's contribution.

We hope to be able to publish these shapes with German and Greek preferred labels and definitions soon!

This is the first of many major Concept updates to be posted over the next 6-12 months during the course of our NEH-funded Linked Open Data project.

Kerameikos hosted by UVA's IATH

This is older news now, but several months after the award of our NEH grant for Kerameikos, we migrated the project from my personal Rackspace cloud server (where I paid out of pocket to keep the project afloat for more than four years) to a Virtual Machine hosted by the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH), a digital humanities center at the University of Virginia. This is an important move for the project, much like receiving the grant, that will stabilize the project at an official institutional home at UVA.

Many thanks to Worthy Martin and Shayne Brandon at IATH for making this possible.

We also have a logo! It was designed by Lauren Massari at IATH based on a prototype by Renee derived from the Met's column krater by Lydos.