Spotlight: the Pelagios Network

The Pelagios Network uses linked open data to share information and support collaboration between scholars. The basic idea of linked open data goes back to the pioneers of the World Wide Web. It is a powerful way to freely use and distribute information.

Throughout this course, we use videos to present perspectives on open research. Take a little time to write notes on these videos: you can download your notes at the end of the course.

Our first video, funded by AHRC and created by Too Tall Productions, takes you on a whistle-stop tour of how the Pelagios Network uses linked open data. As you watch, think about why this has the potential to be a great tool for research.

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Transcript: Video 1: Linked open data, what on earth is that?

Presenter

The archaeologist Winifred Lamb was a pioneer, not only in her research, but as a female in an occupation dominated by men.

Winifred Lamb

Yes, but the research is so slow!

Presenter

Excuse me?

Winifred Lamb

Have you ever heard of linked open data?

Presenter

No.

Winifred Lamb

Right. When I'm fortunate enough to find an object such as this, I want to know more about it and how it links to other objects. But with the current research methods, researching objects and sites can take ages. I have to take a car, a plane, a bus to the library to find a book to look up which museum has the object I want to compare my object with, only to discover it's on loan to a museum in Los Angeles. But these days we have a thing called the World Wide Web.

People like me put their knowledge and research up there for all to see, so it can be viewed by anyone anywhere in the world, and it all links together. It's called ‘linked open data’. And it can help us do research at lightning speed. When you put data out there on the web for all to see, and if we collaborate to help link this data, then that's when we get linked open data. It means objects like this can talk to other objects all around the world. Locations, people, artifacts, books, we can link anything.

Members of the Pelagios community and friends of the Linking Islands of Data network have used the new technology to enrich the writings of the traveller Pausanias. His first-hand accounts of ancient Greece now link to enhanced information. This can lead to museum records, numismatic collections, and catalogues of Greek pottery.

In this way, linked open data can help us make meaningful connections and tell new stories which traditional methods of research could never achieve. And what's more it can be accessed from anywhere in the world. So, through collaboration, we can all help make linked open data truly powerful.

End transcript: Video 1: Linked open data, what on earth is that?

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Video 1: Linked open data, what on earth is that?

Now listen to Professor Elton Barker, classicist and co-founder of the Pelagios Network, to get the backstory. He talks about the very first attempts at collaboration, and how linked open data has helped him with his own research. As you watch the video, think about how this kind of resource could also help with other types of research.

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Transcript: Video 2: Using linked open data

So my name is Elton Barker. I'm a professor of Greek literature and culture at The Open University. That basically means I read a lot of ancient Greek literature and put that into its cultural and political context.

But I'm also interested in the stories that we can extract from ancient Greek narratives in terms of their spatiality.

So we don't have maps of the ancient world, but we do have a lot of spatial knowledge embedded in texts.

So Pelagios, in its initial form, this goes back to 2012, I think. The proof of concept was working with the Persius classical library in the States, lots of people know that, it's a fantastic resource - the German archaeological database, Arachne, and also the Pleiades Gazetteer.

These were our three external partners and through these three external partners, we were able to come up with this lightweight method of connecting data, basically connecting their information.

So what can linked open data do for you? Well, let me give an example from a project that I'm working on.

The title is the Digital Periegesis, which basically means a digital ‘going around’. It's an echoing of a title of an ancient Greek narrative written in the second century CE, by this Greek called Pausanias.

And he gives this deep dive into the Greek mainland.

He doesn't just talk about Athens, he takes you into Athens and he talks about the sites in Athens down to the ground level. So not just there’s the Acropolis, but he takes you into inside the temple, he talks about the statues, the paintings, it's a level of granularity you don't get anywhere else.

And one quick win there, of course, is that we can then visualise the places that he visited , and draw a line, and kind of follow Pausanias' footsteps.

But critically, - this is where the linked open data comes in - there are two things I think are really interesting. The first is, as you are following Pausanias around, you can also link out to other materials. Because Pausanias, I've mentioned, he talks about statues, he talks about paintings. Now, we have this information in other resources, the German archaeological database again comes back. They have great resources in Athens and elsewhere.

So as you are moving through Pausanias' text and he's describing these objects on the ground, you can link out from the text and go and have a look.

The second critical thing, and this is where I think linked data gets really exciting, is that you can discover stuff that he doesn't talk about. Let me give you one example.

In book one, he's in Athens, he's moving around Athens. He's moving around the central marketplace of Athens and moving to talk about the great Olympian Temple of Zeus. You can see it from the map. But then using linked data means we can bring in other information about that area. So what other artefacts are in that area? And one artefact that is shown is the Arch of Hadrian.

Now that appears on our map because that information has been published as linked data, by the Pleiades Gazetteer. But it's not in Pausanias. So that already starts to ask us really interesting questions. Why does he not talk about the Arch of Hadrian? It's not as if he couldn't have seen it. It's still there in Athens. You can go and look at the Arch of Hadrian now. He would probably have had to walk through the Arch of Hadrian to get to the Temple of Zeus.

So why not mention it? I think this idea of using linked data to draw attention to the gaps, the absences, the biases in text, I think is one of the most exciting things about it.

End transcript: Video 2: Using linked open data

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Video 2: Using linked open data

So far in Week 1, you have been introduced to five examples of open research projects from astronomy, medicine, education and the humanities. What do these disparate projects, from very different academic disciplines, have in common? To a greater or lesser extent, they all share some foundational principles. In this course open research will be broken down into three key facets that span across disciplines: transparency, integrity, and accessibility. Let’s start with transparency.