Archaeological and Historical Event Modelling Working Group
The Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities is very excited to lead and start off work on a new Pelagios Working Group focusing on Archaeological and Historical Event Modelling as linked data.
Events are of course central to historical humanities narratives and research, and our aspiration to make them part of a Linked Pasts Network is based on this key role. Unsurprisingly, discussions on modelling events as linked data are not new to the Pelagios Community. In a Pelagios blog post published back in 2017, the Commons were asked whether there was an interest in the establishment of event model “standards” or best practices within the community or whether the event models should be kept largely specific to particularities of projects? And if model standards were the way to go, what entities and relations would be essential for a “core” event model?
Our working group aims to build on these existing considerations and work on events within the Pelagios Community and beyond. Specifically, we aim to identify the issues involved in archaeological and historical event modelling as linked data and linking event-centred content (Figure 1). This, we will do through a series of realistic archaeological and historical event-centred cases that we plan to come up with mainly during our international network event in Ghent on September 26, 2019 and through subsequent conversation. We will then work on modelling these cases using existing event-participation models (such as CIDOC-CRM) and event-centred models (such as LODE: Linking Open Descriptions of Events) and identify recurrent issues in the process. We will be reporting on the issues we identify in a white paper to be published a year from now.
In that white paper, we also aspire to provide the Pelagios community with a set of guidelines and a roadmap for archaeological and historical event modelling with potential future steps for creating an event-centred Linked Pasts Hub following the vision of the Linked Pasts Working Group.
It would be important to emphasize that we do not intend to pre-empt all event variations that form the subject of historical humanities research. Rather, we aim to make suggestions about entities and relations that comprise the essential parts of a “core” event model, which — according to Shaw et al. — should “include only those relations about which a stable consensus has been reached, leaving more interpretive relations to a higher-level, application-specific models”. In this framework, we intend to test, through our realistic use cases, how well the existing models (especially LODE) already identify such stable relations and what changes could improve them. We will also work on examples of how more detailed ontologies specific to local projects can be created and integrated with a core model.
We have many interesting questions to explore and are excited to see how much we will be able to contribute to a Linked Pasts Network of which event-centred hubs are a part.
Piraye Hacıgüzeller and Christophe Verbruggen (on behalf of the working group coordinators Pieterjan De Potter, Tom Gheldof, Iason Jongepier and Tim Soens)
