Σάρδεις

The other important aspect of an object's existence is workflow state. Pleiades has a simple publication workflow that keeps drafting-state objects semi-private and protects published-state objects against corruption.

Easy disambiguation and unique identifiers are properties of this object model. There are many instances of "Alexandria" names in the ancient world. The object with id "alexandria" in the context of place "727070", or places["727070"]["alexandria"] in a notation like that of the Python or Javascript programming language syntax, is distinguished from another "alexandria" object in the context of place "59669" (places["59669"]["alexandria"]).

A Place is a geographical and historical context for Names and Locations.

The concern that informed the RAGE initiative remains valid: geographic interoperation between existing classics-related digital publications will require the collation of disparate, project-level gazetteers. It is our hope that, as Pleiades content is published, its open licensing and comprehensive coverage will catalyze a geo-webby solution.

The repository model was born in a period when spatial datasets were created and used almost exclusively by teams of experts wielding specialized software. Concerns about efficiency, duplication of effort and preservation were key in provoking state interest, and consequently these issues informed repository specifications.

Assuming some level of success in disambiguation and identification of geographic entities in a text, the next step is to associate coordinates with each named entity.

Geoparsing entails first a series of steps, often called collectively "named entity recognition", in which proper nouns in unstructured or semi-structured texts are disambiguated from other words and then associated with known or notional entities of interest (e.g., places, persons, concepts)

The semantics of the tags are as follows: pleiades:depicts=PID The PID place (or what remains) is depicted in the photo pleiades:findspot=PID The PID place is where a photo subject was found pleiades:origin=PID The PID place is where a photo subject was produced pleiades:where=PID The PID place is the location of the photo subject pleiades:place=PID The PID place is otherwise related to the photo or its subject At Pleiades, our immediate use for the machine tags is giving our ancient places excellent portrait photos.

Tom and Dan agreed that it would be useful to distinguish between findspot and place of origin in photos of objects and to distinguish these from photos depicting the physical site of an ancient place.

Pleiades is a gazetteer of ancient places, but one of the things that makes it really useful is that they publish their data in open, easily-consumable formats.

Pleiades provides geospatial data to dozens of digital projects, but it can also be used as a pedagogical tool in the classroom.