La Chronique en ligne/AG Online: First geodata hackathon
Coordinated by Catherine Bouras EFA & Eleni Gkadolou BSA
within the frame of the Linked Pasts Symposium 11
This activity aims at presenting the organisation of places in Archaeology in Greece Online, a combination of modern places, ancient places and research sites and offering an opportunity to participate in the collaborative curation of what seeks to become a community tool.
This workshop invitation, that can also fall under the PN Gazetteer Activity but is also fairly freestanding, concerns the geographic data of Archaeology in Greece Online/La Chronique des fouilles en ligne. This open access online database, which was first developed and released in 2009, collects and presents on a regular basis recent archaeological fieldwork reports to academic researchers and to the interested public. It has a powerful search engine that allows advanced research through regions, toponyms, keywords, periods, etc.
This activity intends to present the platform and offer an overview of the tools that are available to feed and enrich it as well as to cross-reference the data. Participants will learn directly from the curators of the database how the various entries evolve through a double system of geographic information, how it dialogues and interoperates with similar archaeological and geographical tools, placing it in a linked open data environment.
Because the platform was created in 2009, AG Online has a long experience in geolocating its reports and more importantly perhaps, in improving and enriching these geodata. Since it was first launched, there have indeed been significant updates in functionalities and in precision. Earlier entries have not been systematically updated to match this progress. The more AG Online interoperates and is linked to other similar tools, the more its resources need better curation. Participants will have the opportunity to contribute to a cutting-edge collaborative (community?) tool as one of the goals of this activity will seek to curate geodata that AG Online uses and creates in order for it to better align with Pleiades, Topos Text, the Archaeological Cadastre and so on. Here are some of the case studies that this activity may take on:
- Archaeology in Crete: untangling toponyms and organizing ancient sites resources.
- Archaeology in big cities: the example of Athens (granularity/micro-gazetteer)
The activity will be organized as an online “hackathon”, via zoom and will bring together participants who will have the opportunity to connect to the platform in smaller breakout groups and discuss and/or directly curate reference data/resources, after a presentation of the platform and its functionalities. We hope to start the activity on December 2nd and close by Thursday 4th of December at which point we can regroup and present progress and conclusive remarks. The result of this collaborative work will appear shortly after on AG Online and there will be a full report after the symposium.