Pelagios: Mapping the culture of Antiquity online (UK)

A project which will make it easier to discover and map online information about ancient places begins this month. Leif Isaksen, a member of the ECS Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia research group, who is about to commence a Research Fellowship with the Archaeological Computing Research Group, University of Southampton, is leading a global consortium, together with Elton Barker of The Open University, to develop a method of integrating data from existing ancient world resources. He is Co-Investigator on the JISC-funded Pelagios (PELAGIOS: Enable Linked Ancient Geodata In Open Systems) Project which aims to create a common format for referencing ancient locations in online resources over the next nine months. "The inspiration for this project came largely from our on-going Google Ancient Places (GAP) project which aims to identify classical locations in Google Books and other digital libraries," said Mr Isaksen. "Pelagios will take this a step further by creating a generalised and machine-readable format for referring to ancient places in any Web document whether it's a text, map or even database."