Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

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The CLAROS data web represents each resource as a SPARQL end po<strong>in</strong>t that is then queried by the
SPARQL RDF-query language and returns data as RDF. 289 The two ma<strong>in</strong> problems of this approach,
as reported by Kurtz et al. (2009), are semantic <strong>in</strong>tegration (alignment of different data schemas or
ideally mapp<strong>in</strong>g to a s<strong>in</strong>gle schema or ontology) and co-reference resolution (ensur<strong>in</strong>g a reference to
the same object or entity <strong>in</strong> different databases with different names) is recognized as such. Like
EAGLE for epigraphy and APIS for papyrology, CLAROS is support<strong>in</strong>g the federated search<strong>in</strong>g of
multiple classical collections. It is their hope that the use of CIDOC-CRM, RDF and SPARQL will
allow them to <strong>in</strong>tegrate additional classical art collections by mapp<strong>in</strong>g their unique schemas to the core
CIDOC-CRM ontology of CLAROS and add<strong>in</strong>g all necessary entries <strong>in</strong> the co-reference service.
The CLAROS project has many goals, <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g mak<strong>in</strong>g digital facsimiles of images and reference
works available to the general public, provid<strong>in</strong>g scholars access with “datasets of <strong>in</strong>tellectually
coherent material easily and swiftly through one multil<strong>in</strong>gual search facility,” enabl<strong>in</strong>g museums to
access records about their own collections and those of other museums, and to permit both the public
and educational <strong>in</strong>stitutions <strong>in</strong> particular to engage with “high art” <strong>in</strong> new ways. One particular new
way of engag<strong>in</strong>g users that they have developed is a system 290 that allow users to query for new or
related images to an image of their own that they can upload (either directly from their computer or by
select<strong>in</strong>g a web address), and this process is currently based only on image recognition and not textual
descriptors. Another <strong>in</strong>trigu<strong>in</strong>g vision of this project is one <strong>in</strong> which members of the public could take
images of classical art around the world and upload them to CLAROS clouds for image recognition,
identification, and documentation by experts.
The current CLAROS Explorer allows users to either browse or search by five major facets: category,
place, period, text or contribut<strong>in</strong>g data collection. In addition, two other collection brows<strong>in</strong>g options
<strong>in</strong>clude view<strong>in</strong>g a timel<strong>in</strong>e of records <strong>in</strong> the database or brows<strong>in</strong>g a map of places to choose records.
The entire CLAROS collection can be searched by keyword us<strong>in</strong>g a “General Search” and a number of
search terms can be comb<strong>in</strong>ed by choos<strong>in</strong>g values from each list. Search results can be displayed as a
textual list, a series of images, or on a timel<strong>in</strong>e (or results can be viewed as a comb<strong>in</strong>ation of these
options, e.g. a list with images). Click<strong>in</strong>g on an <strong>in</strong>dividual result <strong>in</strong> a search list then takes the user to
the record for that <strong>in</strong>dividual item <strong>in</strong> its home collection (e.g. the Beazley Research Archive).
Classical Geography
The potential of digital technologies for the study of geography with<strong>in</strong> the larger context of the digital
humanities and with a specific focus on classical geography and archaeology 291 has recently been
provided by Stuart Dunn (Dunn 2010). Dunn noted that digital technologies are support<strong>in</strong>g what he
labeled “neogeography” a “discipl<strong>in</strong>e” that is collaborative and <strong>in</strong>cludes new sets of tools and methods,
but also presents its own challenges:
The ‘grand challenge’ for collaborative digital geography therefore, with its vast user base, and
its capacity for generat<strong>in</strong>g new data from across the specialist and non-specialist communities,
is to establish how its various methods can be used to understand better the construction of the
spatial artefact, rather than simply to represent it (Dunn 2010, 56).
289 http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/
290 http://explore.clarosnet.org/XDB/ASP/clarosExplorerImage.asp
291 A number of public doma<strong>in</strong> reference works have been digitized and are useful for the study of classical geography, such as the Topographical
Dictionary of Ancient <strong>Rome</strong> (http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/cgi-b<strong>in</strong>/eos/eos_title.plcallnum=DG16.P72), which has been put onl<strong>in</strong>e by the University of
Chicago, and the Tabula Peut<strong>in</strong>geriana, a medieval copy of a Roman map of the empire, http://www.hsaugsburg.de/~harsch/Chronologia/Lspost03/Tabula/tab_<strong>in</strong>tr.html