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.

First DOI minted for scholarly contribution to Kerameikos.org

Following some very recent updates in Nomisma.org with respect to connecting editors to the concepts they have created or updated, I have copied and pasted all of the code from the Nomisma framework into Kerameikos. Formally, Kerameikos has seven editors, although only my profile has been connected to concepts that already exist in the system (most of which were created in 2014 before our initial demonstration at Computer Applications in Archaeology in Paris [see this paper]).

In collaboration with Sherry Lake from the University of Virginia Library, the first DOI has been minted to point to the list of spreadsheets and IDs I have contributed to Kerameikos. As I said in the Nomisma blog post I wrote earlier today:

Nomisma.org data constitute an enormous body of collective intellectual effort, and it's increasingly important that scholarly digital works receive equal weight as traditional publications. Therefore, the creation of DOIs for Nomisma contributions would appear in the scholarly profile in ORCID. Just recently, the AIA issued updated guidelines for the considerations of tenure and promotion, with specific guidelines for the recognition of digital projects, and so our goal of formalizing this recognition within Nomisma keeps us on the cutting edge with respect modern modes of scholarly communication.

The same obviously applies for this project as well. So we have now achieved in Kerameikos what I hope to in Nomisma in the near future. After having minted the DOI through DataCite, this publication metadata has propagated in several ways:

Datacite Search:

https://search.datacite.org/works?query=%22Ethan+Gruber%22

My ORCID profile:

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4691-9747

Access to machine readable data through content negotiation:

curl -i -L -H "Accept: text/turtle" https://doi.org/10.25888/egruber

@prefix schema: <http://schema.org/> .
<https://doi.org/10.25888/egruber> a schema:Dataset;
   schema:author <https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4691-9747>;
   schema:dateModified "2017-06-21"^^schema:Date;
   schema:datePublished "2014"^^schema:Date;
   schema:description """Contributions of Ethan Gruber to Kerameikos.org. 

                These represent any SKOS Concepts (RDF) created or 

                updated by this editor, by means of batch uploaded
                through Google Sheets or manual editing in the back-end.""";
   schema:identifier [
     a schema:PropertyValue;
     schema:value "http://kerameikos.org/editor/egruber"
   ],  [
     a schema:PropertyValue;
     schema:value "https://doi.org/10.25888/egruber"
   ];
   schema:inLanguage "en";
   schema:license <http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/1.0>;
   schema:name "Contributions of Ethan Gruber to Kerameikos.org.";
   schema:provider [
     a schema:Organization;
     schema:name "DataCite"
   ];
   schema:publisher [
     a schema:Organization;
     schema:name "University of Virginia"
   ];
   schema:schemaVersion <http://datacite.org/schema/kernel-3>;
   schema:url <http://kerameikos.org/editor/egruber> .


<https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4691-9747> a schema:Person;
   schema:familyName "Gruber";
   schema:givenName "Ethan";
   schema:name "Ethan Gruber" .

Many thanks to the UVA Library for supporting us in this, as we are now officially a University of Virginia project since having been awarded an NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant last August.

Kerameikos.org receives NEH Digital Humanities Advancement grant

The Kerameikos.org scientific committee is pleased to announced that the National Endowment for the Humanities has granted the project about $85,000 to develop the full range of Archaic and Classical Greek pottery concepts and a series of software development features and APIs. This is an 18-month Level II Digital Humanities Advancement Grant project. Below is a portion of our application that briefly describes our primary goals for this phase of the project:

Final Product and Dissemination

Experience from development and proliferation of Nomisma.org principles suggests that community buy-in of shared vocabularies and technical methodologies can only come when non-technical specialists (in Nomisma’s case: numismatists and archaeologists) are able to see and use functional web applications. In numismatics, broad buy-in therefore only came after the publication of the first phase of Online Coins of the Roman Empire project, with its multilingual interfaces, geographic and quantitative distribution visualizations, and photographs of coins aggregated from several prominent collections. Similar analytical and visualization tools have been built into Kerameikos.org directly, derived from the small subset of Greek vases from the British Museum and the Getty that were ingested in the initial proof-of-concept phase in 2014. It is our hope that the Linked Open Greek Pottery project will foster similar buy-in among archaeologists, art historians, and museum professionals. These specialists will play an integral role in the long-term curation of data and, ultimately, in the expansion of Kerameikos.org beyond its current Archaic and Classical Greek scope. The final products of this 18-month phase fall into three broad categories, culminating in dissemination:

1. Archaic and Classical Greek Pottery Concepts

All time periods, materials, pottery shapes, styles, production places, and corporate and personal entities (painters, potters, and associated workshops) relevant to Archaic and Classical Greek pottery will be represented in Kerameikos.org according to our metadata application profile (a combination of linked data ontologies). These concepts will be linked to matching concepts in other relevant vocabulary systems, such as the Pleiades Gazetteer of Ancient Places and the Getty Art & Architecture Thesaurus. The metadata application profile will be fully documented in similar fashion to those of the Digital Public Library of America and Europeana. Furthermore, we will register a Wikidata.org property for Kerameikos.org and integrate our vocabularies into Wikidata for broader reuse within the Wikipedia community.

2. A Core Set of Research Data and Tools

Using partners that embrace Open Data principles, we will aggregate Greek vases connected to the concepts defined in Kerameikos.org. These partners include large museums with internationally recognized collections, such as the Getty and the British Museum, but also smaller university museums including the Fralin Museum at the University of Virginia, the Harvard Art Museums, and the Ure Museum of Greek Archaeology at the University of Reading (UK). The aggregation of these collections will facilitate sophisticated (even if incomplete) geographic and distribution analyses and will demonstrate the potential of Kerameikos.org as a research tool for the discipline. The vases will be encoded in CIDOC-CRM conforming to the specifications outlined in linked.art, a community-oriented project driven primarily by Linked Open Data specialists at the Getty Museum.

3. Software Development Extensions for Data Aggregation, Manipulation, and Export

In order to thrive and grow, it is necessary to build and document tools to enable the cleaning and harvesting of data by non-technical specialists. A harvesting application will be developed in the Kerameikos.org back-end that will be able to consume vase data from linked.art-compliant JSON-LD (a linked data model aimed at developers) APIs. One of the most important features of the Linked Open Greek Pottery project is its OpenRefine reconciliation APIs. The Kerameikos.org reconciliation API enables museum curators or archaeologists to standardize labels of shapes, styles, people, etc. to the preferred labels defined in Kerameikos.org, and insert Kerameikos.org URIs directly into the source data. This sort of normalization makes it easier to integrate datasets into the broader Greek vase LOD cloud. The Linked Open Greek Pottery project will expand the functionality of existing APIs, as well as provide documentation for usage. Finally, like Nomisma.org, Kerameikos.org can serve as a content hub for smaller collections that lack personnel or technical expertise to provide data directly to the Pelagios Commons project. Object data stored within the Kerameikos.org SPARQL endpoint will be exported directly into Pelagios’ own RDF model.

OpenRefine Reconciliation API for Kerameikos

Over the last few days, I developed and launched an OpenRefine reconciliation service for Nomisma.org. This service allows a user to clean up spreadsheets (whether for museum objects or personal research data) by reconciling columns of concepts (denominations, mints, people, etc.) against the concepts defined on Nomisma.

Since Kerameikos is built entirely from the same software architecture as Nomisma, I was able to copy and paste all of the associated Orbeon XML Pipeline files and XSLT stylesheets in order to deploy the same reconciliation service at http://kerameikos.org/apis/reconcile.

Like Nomisma, the service supports the main reconciliation API, the autosuggest feature for additional matches, and preview popups that will display the skos:prefLabel and skos:definition in a small HTML popup window.

Preview API

Entity suggestion API

This new feature necessitated the upgrade to the newest version of Orbeon Forms in order to support the processing of JSON in XSLT. These XML pipelines serve as an intermediary process between the OpenRefine API requests, Solr search queries, and the resulting JSON output.

With this new feature, it will be much easier and more efficient to normalize large quantities of Greek vase data against Kerameikos concepts, which will hopefully pave the way toward greater aggregation of data and facilitate more complete and accurate distribution and geographic visualizations.

We are beginning the process of reconciling the Beazley Archive's term lists against Wikidata entities and the Getty vocabularies in order to generate all of the distinct concepts for Greek pottery in Kerameikos. This new API will then facilitate the normalization of Beazley data against Kerameikos, enabling the data to come full circle through a cleaning process.

Experimenting with IIIF, CIDOC-CRM, and the Europeana Data Model

One of our major tasks in the future is to facilitate sophisticated analysis of Greek pottery aggregated by means of coreferencing between Kerameikos.org concepts and other vocabulary systems. The proof of concept that we demonstrated at CAA in Paris included dozens of Greek vases from the Getty and British Museum. One such immediate potential data partner is the Harvard Art Museums.

The Harvard Art Museums have adopted an open approach to their collection and have implemented a powerful and well-documented API. This API has allowed us to integrate thousands of Greek and Roman coins from their collection into Nomisma.org to be made available through several type corpus projects (like Online Coins of the Roman Empire). Harvard contains a nice collection of Greek pottery and a means of harvesting these materials programmatically. Furthermore, they are an adopter of the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), which would enable zooming of large-scale images or dynamic extraction of portions of images, as well as facilitate the annotation of these images with related iconographic or decorative subject matter or inscriptions. Since we are using CIDOC-CRM to describe the vases, the question is: how can we extend our model to include metadata that will enable the integration of IIIF functionality directly in Kerameikos.org?

Fortunately, the hard work has already been done for us. Europeana has already published specifications for linking to IIIF services and metadata manifests within the Europeana Data Model, and there are a number of useful examples, such as those provided by John Howard at the University College Dublin Library.

While we may migrate from FOAF TO EDM properties for linking to large images or thumbnails (edm:preview and others), we do not need to modify the current system of foaf:thumbnail and foaf:depiction in order to accommodate IIIF integration.

We can do this by adding some more triples about the URL of the foaf:depiction.  E.g.,

?vase a crm:E22_Man-Made_Object ;
    foaf:depiction <http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUAM:DDC251369_dynmc>.


<http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUAM:DDC251369_dynmc> a edm:WebResource ;
     svcs:has_service <https://ids.lib.harvard.edu/ids/iiif/46594017>
    dcterms:isReferencedBy <http://iiif.harvardartmuseums.org/manifests/object/288118>.

<https://ids.lib.harvard.edu/ids/iiif/46594017> a svcs:Service ;
    dcterms:conformsTo <http://iiif.io/api/image> ;
    doap:implements <http://iiif.io/api/image/2/level2.json>.

 In our SPARQL query for aggregating objects, we can optionally extract the dcterms:isReferencedBy for the foaf:depiction of our Greek vase. There's an XSLT conditional for parsing the SPARQL response so that our fancybox JQuery plugin will either show a popup of an image file or a popup window of the Leaflet IIIF plugin.

As a simple proof of concept, I have extracted two vases (RDF here) from Harvard of the Berlin Painter and successfully implemented the RDF model and modified the accompanying SPARQL queries and code accordingly to show zoomable images of these vases.