Announcing the Pelagios Network Association
The Pelagios way of linking data has always focused on empowering people to produce connections between the digital resources that matter to them. A major part of this decentralising effort has been building a lively community working with geographic data in humanities disciplines (history, language and literary studies, archaeology, etc.), and cultural heritage (galleries, libraries, archives and museums).
We regard this diverse and distributed network of individual institutions, groups and researchers collaborating on projects and initiatives as the best way of strengthening and sustaining the LOD ecosystem. From now on Pelagios itself — its organising, development plans, and future direction — will be in the hands of the community.
Last week the Pelagios Network Association was born.
The Network is Pelagios’s approach to growing and sustaining its community beyond the constraints of single project phases. While all work remains the purview of individual Partners, as a persistent legal entity the Pelagios Network offers a framework for Partners to develop and coordinate collaborative work on Linked Open Geodata.
This framework is organised around six core Activities devoted to sustaining and further developing the work of linking historical documents and cultural heritage through common references to places: Semantic Annotation, Collaboration & Resourcing, Gazetteer Alignment, Documentation & Pedagogy, Registry, and Visualisation & Analysis. Each Activity is coordinated by a group made up of equal and independent Partners working in tandem with each other.
All institutions, groups and individual researchers are welcome to join us in this collective endeavour. All that is required to become a Partner of the Network is an agreement in which the prospective Partner outlines their contribution to one or more of the Network’s Activities in consultation with existing Partners. Or, you can become a Member of the Network simply by joining our Mailing List.
For more information on the network, how to become a Partner or Member, and the details of the Activities, visit http://pelagios.org.
