More than 14,000 objects from the Met Museums added

Thanks to the Met Museum's Open Access policy, we have been able to integrate more than 14,000 objects from the museum's collection into Kerameikos.org. These objects were extracted from the Met's CSV export to Github, supplemented with image URLs from a derivative repository. This tranche of data does not include all ancient Greek and Greek-aligned (e.g., Cypriot) ceramics, but only those filtered from approximately 1000-400 BCE. Therefore, the dataset includes Geometric pottery and the vast swath of Archaic and Classical objects, but ends before the Hellenistic period. The majority of these objects are fragments, but there are many intact objects among the collection, which are accessible by visiting related Kerameikos concepts. For example, the integration of the Met's collection into the Greek pottery Linked Open Data cloud has added three additional vases to the example specimens of the Archaic potter/painter, Exekias.

 

An amphora by Exekias from the Met Museum, 17.230.14a, b

 

There are a few key pieces of data missing from this objects, however: 1) Only the main image is made available in Kerameikos, from the supplementary CSV file from Github since there are API rate restrictions that prohibit us from extracting more URLs for display, 2) The CSV and API do not include the technique (e.g., Black-figure), even though the technique is visible on the object's web page on the Met's collection database site, and 3) the provenance (findspot) is also not included in the public data, although it must certainly be recorded internally. That makes these data somewhat limiting for geographic query and visualization.

Nevertheless, this is the largest dataset integrated into Kerameikos so far since sherds are included, although they had been mainly excluded from the British Museum material we harvested. We do have flags in our source OpenRefine data regarding whether an object is fragmentary or not, but have not introduced the state of conservation into the CIDOC-CRM linked data in Kerameikos (which conforms to the Linked Art profile), which would enable the filtering of complete and incomplete objects in the user interfaces. We will likely implement this, eventually.  

New content added to Kerameikos.org

After a four year hiatus in adding content to Kerameikos.org, the project is rebooting for a new phase. Although Kerameikos has been the subject of presentations and articles in 2023 and 2024, the last content to be entered into the vocabulary was Nick Harokopos' translations of shape definitions into Greek. Recently, shape definition translations into Hebrew were added by University of Virginia student Matan Goldstein.

Today, more than 950 Attic vases from the Ashmolean Museum at the University of Oxford were integrated into the Greek pottery Linked Open Data cloud. The new Ashmolean collections database enables CSV export, which was reconciled in OpenRefine to Kerameikos URIs for shapes, techniques, artists, etc (using the reconciliation APIs that we built for Kerameikos). I should note that only the Attic vases were exported (almost entirely Archaic and Classical), not all objects from the ancient Greek world, so much remains to be integrated from the museum. Additionally, only Black-figure painters and potters have been rigorously defined. There is a smattering of Red-figure artists in Kerameikos from our 2014 prototype (Berlin Painter, Achilles Painter, and a few others), but we have not yet minted URIs for the whole range of Attic Red-figure artists. Therefore, some Ashmolean vases don't link to artist URIs that have not yet been created.

An example of a Kylix Type A from the Ashmolean: 

AN1974.344

 

More than 260 these these vases link to approximately 60 distinct place URIs, defined by Wikidata, improving the geographic visualization of related concepts. 

Kerameikos concept pages link to a single Ashmolean example image, although there are IIIF manifests that include multiple photographs. However, it seems there is an issue with their IIIF image server delivering tiles, so a full representation of photography will have to wait until the technical issue is resolved.

Lastly, we have migrated the canonical URIs for Kerameikos concepts and ontology classes and properties (which extend CIDOC-CRM ones) to https. If you are using these URIs in your own database, we recommend replacing http with https.