Catalog of deities

Notes towards the catalog of deities

At the moment we don't have a fully usable and citable catalog of deities, from antiquity or otherwise, in the vein of VIAF (for people), of the Perseus Catalog (for authors from antiquity), of Pleiades (for ancient places), or Semium (for time) or Geonames (for places).

However, if we want to have editions as arguments and encoding as interpretation, we need to be able to tag "Apollo", "Hercules", or "Ariadne" in a text and refer to their unique and standard identification somewhere.

Possible starting points for a catalog of deities

• Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae (LIMC), holding a database with fields such as "Proper name" and "Category", open to queries after registration
• Mapping Ancient Polytheisms (MAP), a relational database recording divine names and epithets as they actually appear in Greek and West-Semitic inscriptions, papyri and literary sources, with fields for the source, the onomastic elements, and the ritual/social context of each attestation, but organized around individual "onomastic sequences" rather than one fixed entry per god, so there's no single canonical ID to search by deity name alone.
• MANTO, a born-digital dataset mapping the whole storyworld of Greek myth (people, gods, places, objects, monsters, events) as a network of interconnected entities with stable URIs, explorable via graph, map, or semantic search, but gods are just one entity type among many, not a dedicated category, and the data model favors narrative "ties" over deity-specific attributes like cult epithets or iconography.
• the Theoi Project, a site exploring Greek mythology and the gods in classical literature and art, with encyclopedic articles and separate page for each deity listed (in English, but with no (visible) categories and IDs
• Trismegistos Gods, a database cataloguing named deities (TM Gods) attested in Greek, Latin, Demotic and other texts from the ancient Mediterranean, with a stable numeric ID for each god and linked lists of personal and place names derived from it
• the project SNAP:DRGN (Standards for Networking Ancient Prosopographies: Data and Relations in Greco-roman Names) had as ambition "it will in 2014 aim to (a) propose recommendations for linking together multiple classical person-databases into a single web of linked data, parallel to the Pleiades and Pelagios projects, and (b) help to produce RDF and stable URIs for the persons, names and other person-like entities in as many digital resources as possible"
• dbpedia, a crowd-sourced community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and make this information available on the Web.
• Wikidata, a general-purpose knowledge base with an entry (and QID) for essentially every named deity across world mythologies, cross-linked to Trismegistos, VIAF, and other authority files, and queryable via SPARQL, but the entries are crowd-edited rather than built from specialist authority control, and can flatten genuinely contested questions of divine identity (e.g. whether two cult epithets denote the "same" god) into a single tidy node

Deity-related DBpedia categories

It would be nice if there were a book or a cookbook on how to search for categories inside dbpedia, but a digital classicist has made some promising discoveries:

(for Jupiter):

is dbpprop:characters of

       • dbpedia:Amphitryon_(play)

is dbpprop:romanEquivalent of

       • dbpedia:Zeus

(for Mercury):

dcterms:subject

       • category:Death_gods
       • category:Deities
       • category:Messenger_gods
       • category:Roman_gods
       • category:Commerce_gods
       • category:Gods
       • category:Trickster_gods
       • category:Deities_in_the_Aeneid
       • category:Gods_depicted_by_Ovid
       • category:Gods_depicted_by_Virgil

rdf:type

       • yago:Cognition100023271
       • yago:Content105809192
       • yago:Deity109505418
       • yago:DeitiesInTheAeneid
       • yago:PsychologicalFeature100023100
       • yago:Abstraction100002137
       • yago:Belief105941423
       • yago:SpiritualBeing109504135

See also a PHP script that crawls dbpedia to create EAC-CPF records for people and families/dynasties, written by Ethan Gruber:

• DBpedia to EAC
• a good, simple and understandable, point to start is the faceted search, offered here: DBpedia Precision Search & Find

Further promising categories:

• yago:GreekGoddesses, SPARQL query:

select distinct ?s1 as ?c1 where 
 { 
   ?s1 a <http://dbpedia.org/class/yago/GreekGoddesses> .
 }
order by desc ( <LONG::IRI_RANK> ( ?s1 ) ) limit 20 offset 0

Strategy for a catalog

• get data from somewhere (in many languages)
• organize a RDF set of "things" to wrap the data in
• set up a service
• solve any philosophical and theological questions which will arise in the process (is Ariadne a deity? Is Patria a deity? Are there several Aphrodites and Zeuses, or just one of each?)