Dear Colleagues,
The Data for history consortium was created with the vision of fostering collaboration between projects, and data interoperability for scholarly research, and thus contribute to promoting a culture of data sharing and collaboration in historical research - adopting a spirit of altruism in a world otherwise apparently dominated by individualist struggles and other rationales. We hope that together we will succeed in developing this vision. In that spirit we wish you, your families and friends, all the best for the New Year.
With regards to the business of the consortium, we are preparing the Leipzig DfH mambers meeting on April 4th-5th and would like to devote one of the sessions at that time to a discussion about the issues that you face in the field of interoperability, understood in a broad sense, i.e. adoption of existing conceptual/data models, the construction of new domain ontologies, the creation and/or adoption of controlled vocabularies and gazetteers, the alignment of datasets, software, and platforms. We would like to invite you to prepare a discussion on one of these or other analogous issues that pose a challenge in your projects, or to elaborate your research agenda and discuss it with the other presenters. Each member or project will have ten minutes to give a statement on the given issue, followed by a ten minute discussion allowing for a communication and collaboration with regards to the issue presented. A more general discussion will follow building on the issues arising and in line with the overall aims of Data for History.
We therefore send to you a call for issues setting the 17th of February (included) as deadline. Please make use of the Forum to document and announce your issue. In doing so, please include links to your project and other relevant information, and then send to us the link to your forum post. Once the deadline has passed, we will organize the issues in the forum in a common place and have a group conversation with you about the most urgent questions to be addressed during the meeting and in our general discussions.
Insofar as OntoME is now in production (in Beta Version) for actively managing ontologies, a pertinent subject that might be of general interest is about aligning your local data models with standard ontologies. But of course any other issue of interest for you is welcome.
Without further ado: to your pens !
Best wishes
Francesco Beretta and George Bruseker
Today I learned about the SARI project (https://docs.swissartresearch.net/) which of course George knows all about. This includes a framework for recording artist information. I would like us to discuss the extent to which this ontology, developed with an art historical perspective, would be appropriate for the purposes of recording people for historical research and prosopographical studies. I would further like us to consider its value in relation to genealogical data.
Hi Richard, I am just seeing your input. I would be happy to update about this work and talk about how it might be extended and developed in order to think about broader prosopographical issues. I could certainly do an intervention about what is being doing with SARI, and it would then be interesting to gather inputs from others about the suitability of this reference model to serve as a base to extend to more specific issues. Genealogy would of course be an interesting issue to discuss. Would you be interested to intervene from that perspective?
George,
I would be happy to talk about this from the perspective of indexing sites like Free UK Genealogy and 'reference' sites; specifically WikiTree. We should really also think about existing standards, e.g. GEDCOM (!) and SnapDrgn.
Richard