From Linking Places to a Linked Pasts Network
Karl Grossner, first published December 2017
In December 2017 The Linked Pasts Working Group of Pelagios Commons (LPWG) completed a white paper, “From Linking Places to a Linked Pasts Network.” [PDF]
The paper reports on our activity enumerating user requirements for a future Linked Pasts technical infrastructure, and makes some interim recommendations: for a distributed architecture (a “Linked Pasts Network”) and for further extending Peripleo’s annotation index (including people, events, works, etc.). We also discuss issues of community and sustainability, key ingredients for future success. Our first recommendation is that feedback to this paper (much, we hope) be incorporated into a revised document representing more views than our “gang of eight” [1].
Our work on requirements was greatly aided by the preliminary products of a July workshop held at the DH2017 conference in Montréal, “Advancing Linked Open Data in the Humanities.” Its co-organizers, Susan Brown and Kim Martin generously encouraged us to leverage that work in our own. We eagerly anticipate their summary report and follow-up for what was a very well-attended and energetic gathering.
At the December 2016 Linked Pasts II meeting in Madrid, we had also charged ourselves with planning for a Linked Pasts online publication. However, not long afterwards, a decision was taken by the Commons Committee that, rather than establishing new publications, working groups should contribute material highlighting their activities to the Commons newsletter.
[1] Karl Grossner, Timothy Hill, Rainer Simon, Richard Light, Arno Bosse, Gabriel Bodard, Mia Ridge, and Wolfgang Schmidle
