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Linking Angels through the Cloud

Syriaca.org: A Short Introduction

Daniel L. Schwartz, Texas A&M

David A. Michelson, Vanderbilt

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Core entities (categories of historical analysis):

Places, Persons, Works (Primary Source Texts), Citations (Bibliographic Items), Factoids (Events), Ontology (Keyword Classification), Manuscripts, Artifacts

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Places

Persons

Works (Primary Source Texts)

Citations (Bibliographic Items)

Factoids (Events)

Ontology (Keyword Classification)

Manuscripts

Artifacts

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Places

Persons

Works (Primary Source Texts)

Citations (Bibliographic Items)

Factoids (Events)

Ontology (Keyword Classification)

Manuscripts

Artifacts

What are the best practices?

Need for digital standards for Syriac studies.

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Places: Pelagios, Pleiades

Persons: SNAP:DRGN, VIAF

Works (Primary Source Texts): CBSC,VIAF, Perseus, CTS/DTS, Trismegistos

Citations (Bibliographic Items): WorldCat, Dublin Core, Zotero, Syri.ac, Archive.org

Factoids (Events): PASE, PBW

Ontology (Keyword Classification): CBSC, Brock, LOC, InPhO

Manuscripts: TEI, Fihrist UK, Beta maṣāḥǝft, Papyri.info

Artifacts: TBA (CIDOC CRM?)

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Places

Persons

Works (Primary Source Texts)

Citations (Bibliographic Items)

Factoids (Events)

Ontology (Keyword Classification)

Manuscripts

Artifacts

Minting URIS for these entities.

Think of a URI as an identifier number.

Providing a service for named entities for the Syriac LOD community.

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The Syriac Gazetteer

syriaca.org/geo

Editors:

Thomas A. Carlson, Oklahoma State University

David A. Michelson, Vanderbilt University

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URI for each entity.

Edessa =

http://syriaca.org/place/78

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The URI is the core aspect of each entry. The purpose of the rest of the entry is to define the historical concept (e.g. place) named by the URI. LIMIT: only enough for disambiguation.

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Goal of Syriaca.org is to provide digital structure for linking, data aggregation, and search. Our goal is NOT collecting data. This would be impossible. We aim to provide a platform for linking your data collections.

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Linking Syriaca.org URI to URIS from other resources eg. Pleiades, Wikipedia, Pelagios, etc. (also to “print” resources).

This provides Syriac projects connection to the larger LOD world.

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Other Data:

Variant Name Forms

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Other Data:

Short descriptions

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Other Data:

Attestations in Texts, Manuscripts, or Material Evidence

Using URIs for works

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Other Data:

Citations

with URIS

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Other Data:

Any other entities with URIS (other places, persons, works, etc.)

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New Handbook of Syriac Literature

syriaca.org/nhsl

General Editors:

Nathan P. Gibson, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

David A. Michelson, Vanderbilt University

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A Guide to Syriac Authors

(Syriac Biographical Dictionary, vol 2)

syriaca.org/authors

General Editors:

David A. Michelson, Vanderbilt University

Nathan P. Gibson, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

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Technical Details

Open Source App: Srophé designed by Winona Salesky

OPEN ACCESS DATA (CC-BY) stored in TEI XML and serialized as RDF and JSON

Data available through API, SPARQL endpoint, github

Srophé App now in use by 7 other digital humanities projects ranging from medieval Chinese architecture, to early modern Peru, to corpus linguistics.

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Doing things with URIs (two projects in development)

  • SPEAR: Syriac Persons, Events, and Relations
  • e-GEDSH: An electronic version of the Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage

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Thank you!

To Wido and the organizers and sponsors.

To Winona Salesky our developer who is the one who has made everything work and beautiful!

To the many projects who we copied to learn how to do this: Tom Elliott and Pleiades, Pelagios, Trismegistos, SNAP-DRGN, Papyri.info and many others.

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For discussion

  1. What do users need? (Authoring tools for PhD indices!!!)
  2. Do you need new URIS/new entities?
  3. New modules? Editorial collaboration? Artifacts?
  4. How can we customize our API for your use?
  5. Would a collective RDF Data Dump be useful?
  6. Collective Data Repository?
  7. Serialization of your projects to other portals via Syriaca.org, for example to MESA http://www.mesa-medieval.org/