Standards for Networking Ancient Prosopographies

Available

• Project description: http://snapdrgn.net/
• Cookbook (2022): https://github.com/SNAP-DRGN/Cookbook/wiki
• Ontology (2015): https://github.com/SNAP-DRGN/Ontology

Investigators

• PI: Gabriel Bodard
• Original team: Hugh Cayless, Mark Depauw, Leif Isaksen, Faith Lawrence, Sebastian Rahtz
• Other contributors: Tom Gheldof, Greta Hawes, Richard Light, R. Scott Smith, Rada Varga

Description

SNAP:DGRN or SNAP (Standards for Networking Ancient Person-data) began as a UK-funded project in 2014–15 to pilot Linked open data recommendations for recording and interchanging data between prosopographical and other ancient person-data records. The project originally produced a kind of data silo: a triplestore of 650,000 or so records (some 16 million RDF triples) from the contributing datasets, assigned new URIs by the SNAP project and hosted under a service-level agreement.

This agreement having expired, and the triplestore become defunct, the thinking behind later iterations of the SNAP recommendations has changed. The focus now is on an interchange format to encourage interoperability between digital datasets of historical people, without any aspiration to central hosting of data or minting of "SNAP URIs". SNAP is a formal partner of the Pelagios Network and participant in the LOD People activity in particular.

From the new Cookbook website (accessed 2023-03-03):

The SNAP:DRGN cookbook includes guidelines of two kinds:

1. General recommendations for making digital publications of historical person-data or prosopography interoperable, including the use of stable, dereferenceable URIs, open standards, linking to other datasets, among other things.
2. A proposal for the use of RDF and a working ontology for expressing a minimalist subset of any given person-dataset or prosopography to maximise interoperability.

Together these are intended to enable the alignment of datasets collecting historical persons and the annotation of person references in digital editions and other sources to disambiguated authorities of person records. (For example, a scholar might create "merge" or co-reference statements about two person-datasets, neither of which she was responsible for. You might annotate your texts with person URIs without having any role in creating or encoding the prosopography to which you are referencing.)

From the "About" section of the 2015 project website (Accessed 2018-03-06):

[The]'Standards for Networking Ancient Prosopographie': Data and Relations in Greco-Roman Names (hereafter SNAP:DRGN) project [aims] to address the problem of linking together large collections of material (datasets) containing information about persons, names and person-like entities managed in heterogeneous systems and formats.

The SNAP:DRGN project will pilot a new approach to working with diverse person data, using as a starting point three large datasets from the classical world: the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names, an Oxford-based corpus of persons mentioned in ancient Greek texts; Trismegistos, a Leuven-run database of names and persons from Egyptian papyri; Prosopographia Imperii Romani, a series of printed books listing senators and other elites from the first three centuries of the Roman Empire. We shall model a simple structure using Web and Linked data technologies to represent relationships between databases and to link from references in primary texts to authoritative lists of persons and names. We shall invite new projects and datasets in the domain to participate in the SNAP:DRGN network, to help us test the structures and contribute material on ancient people to the collection, and will help these projects to transform their data into a form that can be linked and annotated. We also plan to produce tools for illustration of the value of this data, and demonstrate research methods for working with the new material and information produced. The project will also show how to enhance and produce new data, generating new person references and links from classical texts that have not yet been looked at in this way (Greek and Latin inscriptions). We shall share our recommendations and our results through workshops, public conference papers, and a range of technical, academic and popular publications.

Participating projects and datasets

• Trismegistos People and Trismegistos Authors
• Lexicon of Greek Personal Names
• Prosopographia Imperii Romani (serialization in RDF by Tom Elliott)
• VIAF
• British Museum person authority list
• Prosopography of the Byzantine World
• Epigraphische Datenbank Heidelberg (open annotations)
• Perseus Catalog
• Zenon catalogue author list
• Digital Marmor Parium (open annotations)

Full list at http://snapdrgn.net/team and http://snapdrgn.net/database

References and presentations

• Gabriel Bodard. 2021. “Linked Open Data for Ancient Names and People.” in Linked Open Data for the Ancient Mediterranean: Structures, Practices, Prospects (edd. Bond, Dilley, Horne). ISAW Papers 20 (2021). Available: http://dlib.nyu.edu/awdl/isaw/isaw-papers/20-4/
• Bodard, G., Cayless, H., Depauw, M., Isaksen, L., Lawrence, K.F., & Rahtz, S. 2017. “Standards for networking ancient person data: digital approaches to problems in prosopographical space.” Digital Classics Online 3.2, pp. 28–43. Available: http://dx.doi.org/10.11588/dco.2017.0.37975
• K. Faith Lawrence. 2015. “‘Prosopography’ is Greek for Facebook: The SNAP:DRGN Project.” Proceedings of the ACM Web Science Conference (New York: Association for Computing Machinery, 2015). Available: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2786451.2786496

Seminars

• Monica Berti and Gabriel Bodard. 2021. “Named Entity Recognition and Prosopography.” SunoikisisDC programme. Available: https://github.com/SunoikisisDC/SunoikisisDC-2020-2021/wiki/SunoikisisDC-Summer-2021-Session-9
• Gabriel Bodard and Rada Varga. 2017. “Prosopography and linked person data.” SunoikisisDC programme. Available: https://github.com/SunoikisisDC/SunoikisisDC-2017-2018/wiki/Prosopography-and-linked-person-data
• Gabriel Bodard and Chiara Palladino. 2016. “Named Entity Recognition: SNAP:DRGN and Recogito.” SunoikisisDC programme. Available: https://github.com/SunoikisisDC/SunoikisisDC-2016/wiki/Named-Entity-Recognition:-SNAP-and-Recogito-%28February-24%29
• Sebastian Rahtz and Gabriel Bodard. 2014. “Standards for Networking Ancient Prosopographies: Data and Relations in Greco-Roman Names (SNAP:DRGN).” Digital Classicist London. Available: https://www.digitalclassicist.org/wip/wip2014-09sr.html

See also

• Greco-Roman Prosopographies