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

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scholars, will <strong>in</strong>tegrate archival materials with computational l<strong>in</strong>guistics and other text-m<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g
capabilities (Harley et al. 2010, 118).
These themes of “next-generation” digital archives and the need to comb<strong>in</strong>e them with sophisticated
language technologies are revisited <strong>in</strong> later sections of this report.
To conclude this section we describe one major technology project that seeks to support the encod<strong>in</strong>g
of historical <strong>in</strong>formation wherever it is found, namely, the HEML, Historical Event and Markup
L<strong>in</strong>k<strong>in</strong>g Project (Robertson 2009), which seeks to provide markup standards and tools with which to
encode historical <strong>in</strong>formation on the web. In a state of evolution s<strong>in</strong>ce 2001, HEML now has an RDF
data model that allows it to represent nested events and relations of causality between events. The
HEML data format supports collections of events where each is tagged with heml:Event, which at their
simplest are bound to mach<strong>in</strong>e-readable spans of time and references to evidence. Other important
features of the model <strong>in</strong>clude the assignment of a URI 185 to each entity and the utilization of an
evidence element:
Persons, roles, locations, and keywords are assigned mandatory URIs so that they may be
referred to <strong>in</strong> multiple events. F<strong>in</strong>ally, one or more heml:Evidence elements must be attributed
to each event, and with<strong>in</strong> these there is a means by which different editions and l<strong>in</strong>guistic
representations of the same text may be grouped together for the researcher's benefit
(Robertson 2009).
These encod<strong>in</strong>g choices illustrate the importance of us<strong>in</strong>g unique URIs to identify specific entities so
that they can not only be referred to <strong>in</strong> multiple encoded historical events but also be reused as “l<strong>in</strong>ked
data” 186 by other applications. The ability to l<strong>in</strong>k encoded events to attestations <strong>in</strong> primary texts is also
of critical importance. One criticism often made of HEML, Robertson stated, is that “it is not possible
to encode the variations <strong>in</strong> op<strong>in</strong>ions regard<strong>in</strong>g historical events.” The ability to encode multiple
scholarly op<strong>in</strong>ions and to <strong>in</strong>dicate the uncerta<strong>in</strong>ty of knowledge regard<strong>in</strong>g dates or other <strong>in</strong>formation
are important features of any markup for historical texts. Robertson does argue, however, that URIs
could eventually be created for scholars, and specific encoded arguments could be l<strong>in</strong>ked to those
URIs.
Classical Archaeology
Overview
Archaeology is the study of the material rema<strong>in</strong>s and environmental effects of human behavior
throughout prehistory to the modern era. Scholarship <strong>in</strong> archaeology is divided <strong>in</strong>to a large number of
subdiscipl<strong>in</strong>es, many def<strong>in</strong>ed geographically (e.g., North America, Egypt, Near East, Oceania) and/or
by time period (e.g., Paleolithic, Neolithic, Classical). A moderately sized field, archaeology overlaps
with a range of other scholarly discipl<strong>in</strong>es, <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g biological anthropology, ethnobotany,
paleozoology, geology, and classics (<strong>in</strong> particular, palaeography, philology, papyrology, epigraphy,
numismatics, history of the ancient world, Hellenic literature, and art and architectural history)
(Harley et al. 2010, 30).
185 A URI has been def<strong>in</strong>ed as a “compact sequence of characters that identifies an abstract or physical resource.” For more on the syntax and architecture
of URIs, see http://labs.apache.org/webarch/uri/rfc/rfc3986.html - overview
186 Tim Berners-Lee has described l<strong>in</strong>ked data as essential to the creation of the Semantic Web, and the creation of l<strong>in</strong>ked data must follow four essential
rules: 1. “Use URIs as names for th<strong>in</strong>gs,” 2.“Use HTTP URIs so that people can look up those names,” 3. Use standards such as RDF and SPARQL so that
when someone looks up a URI it provides useful <strong>in</strong>formation, and 4. Include l<strong>in</strong>ks to other URIs to support further discovery.
http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/L<strong>in</strong>kedData.html