Expired research project Europeana network of Ancient Greek and Latin Epigraphy
EAGLE – Europeana network of Ancient Greek and Latin Epigraphy, is a best-practice network to form the new online archive for epigraphy in Europe, co-funded through the ICT - Policy Support Programme of the European Commission. The EAGLE Best Practice Network is part of Europeana, a multi-lingual online collection of millions of digitised items from European museums, libraries, archives and multi-media collections.
EAGLE will link and connect according to best practices of Linked Open Data in a single readily-searchable platform, thousands of inscriptions, photos of inscriptions and related contextual items. The project will make available the vast majority of the surviving inscriptions of the Greco-Roman world, complete with the essential information about them and, for all the most important, one or more translations. EAGLE will endeavour to connect with all other main projects online about the Ancient World and make its data accessible to other aggregator and LOD projects to increase the quality, usability and accessibility of data provided by the BPN.
Impressions
General Goals
- to enrich Europeana with an important and vast collection of ancient writings on ancient artefacts: a new type of content which is totally missing now.
- to attract tourists and mobile users to Europeana, who will be able to access quickly info and translations pertaining to inscriptions of interest;
- to establish a new community of mobile users revolving around access to inscriptions working on two flagship mobile applications with an image recognition system;
- to provide specialists and Classical Greek and Latin culture enthusiasts (epigraphists, curators, researchers, students, etc) with a new unified resource and with rich metadata sets available as Linked Open Data for making the most of it;
- to support the above community services through a dedicated ICT infrastructure.
Tasks
University of Heidelberg and the Epigraphic Database Heidelberg take part in this project as leader of WP 2 on Networking and Best Practices and especially work on:
Translations and Content curation
In this Working Group we closely work with Wikimedia Italia in order to:
- gather and organize existing translations of inscriptions in several languages
- insert new translations of inscriptions
- link photos in Wikimedia Commons with existing records of inscriptions
We do this work in our EAGLE MEDIA WIKI, a MediaWiki with the WikiBase extension to work with the latest of the Wikimedia Foundation projects: Wikidata.
GIS and Terminologies
This Working Group deals with two main tasks:
- Alignment and definition of online Vocabularies of technical terms.
- Alignment and harmonization of Geographical informations
The work on Places can always be seen on Trismegistos Places, already gathering more then 20.000 cards from ancient places of provenance of inscriptions in the EAGLE BPN.
The EAGLE Vocabularies already contain in total around 2.000 terms consistently related to each other in several languages, which are accessible in multiple formats for use in Linked Open Data projects. There are currently seven Eagle Vocabularies at an early stage of definition: Type of inscription, Object Type (including Monuments), Material (Synchronized with the Salzburg Simplified Petrography), Writing, Decoration, State of Preservation, Dating criteria.
IPR and user engagement
In this Working Group we seek all best practices and procedure to label digital materials pertaining to Cultural Heritage in Europe. This Working Group also deals with best practices for user engagement to provide quality training or interaction tools to non-specialist while generating scholarly reusable material for research. This involves:
- studies of user behaviour
- identification of user groups
- concepts for active participation of user groups
- concepts of specific services for specific user groups (e.g. school projects)
Other tasks
University of Heidelberg works also on the conversion, cross-walking and enrichment of inscribed materials in EpiDoc.
Get involved
You can Join EAGLE as individual or with your project at any time, please, contact Pietro Liuzzo for more information: pietro.liuzzo@zaw.uni-heidelberg.de
There have been several events organized within the EAGLE project:
- a Workshop in Ljubljana 18-20 February 2014
- an International conference in Paris in September 2014
- a Workshop in Nicosia in February 2015
- an International conference in Rome in September 2015