PeriodO

Available
http://perio.do (project website)

http://n2t.net/ark:/99152/p0 (gazetteer permalink)

Project Team

 * PI: Adam Rabinowitz (The University of Texas at Austin)
 * Co-PI: Ryan Shaw (The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)
 * Co-PI: Lorraine Haricombe (The University of Texas at Austin)
 * Consultant (phase 1): Eric Kansa (Open Context)
 * Developer: Patrick Golden (The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)

Description
The Periods, Organized (PeriodO) project, now in its second phase, seeks to build a Linked Open Data gazetteer of period definitions provided by authoritative sources. Each definition includes three critical components: the authority or source, a statement of temporal coverage (in some form of calendrical time, however vague), and a statement of spatial coverage (again, however vague). The gazetteer parses these statements to provide four-part ISO8601 calendar dates and a geo-resolvable LD statement of spatial coverage (currently, national boundaries in DBpedia). By documenting period usage, rather than seeking to create a unified thesaurus of period concepts, PeriodO seeks to preserve differences of opinion, scholarly tradition, and national standards. In the first phase of the project, funded by a Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (2014-2015), the team solidified the data model, constructed a browser-based client that can display both a canonical, curated dataset (with permalinks provided by the ARK ID framework of the EZID system) and local indexed databases with user-generated values, and added 3500 definitions collected from project partners and harvested from publications.

In the second phase of the project, funded by a National Leadership Grant for Libraries from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (2016-2018), the team has worked on visualizations to improve the usefulness of the client and reconciliation and aggregation tools to make it easier for data managers to implement PeriodO URIs in their own datasets, and to link their information with other periodized datasets.

Now it is also possible to run the PeriodO client in your browser. You can use it to browse or edit any dataset that conforms to the PeriodO data model or to look at the canonical dataset of periods curated by the PeriodO project.

Partners and contributors

 * ARIADNE
 * British Museum
 * China Historical GIS
 * Digital Index of North American Archaeology
 * Fasti Online
 * GeoDia
 * German Archaeological Institute
 * Historiska museet
 * Incipit CSIC
 * Levantine Ceramics Project
 * Open Context
 * Pleiades
 * Portable Antiquities Scheme
 * Priniatikos Pyrgos Project (LinkedArc)
 * Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed
 * UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology