EPNet Workshop at AIAC 2018 24/5/2018
ICCA-AIAC 2918 19th International Conference of Classical Archaeology: “Archaeology & Economy in the Ancient World”. Colonia-Bonn (Germany).
Workshop
“Ontology-based data access (OBDA) for classical archaeological and historical data: the EPNET experience” Speakers Xavi Gimenez and Guillem Rull
Semantic Web technologies are rapidly changing historical research and research in humanities. Over the last decades, an immense amount of new quantifiable data have been accumulated, and made available in interchangeable formats, opening up new possibilities for solving old questions and posing new ones. Historians are starting to use new digital sources to aggregate information about history: collections of data, information, and knowledge that are devoted to the preservation of the legacy of tangible and intangible culture inherited from previous generations. The workshop aims at discussing the results obtained in the EPNet Project (“Production and distribution of food during the Roman Empire: Economics and Political Dynamics”, ERC-2013) on providing historians with computational tools to compare, aggregate, measure, geo-localise, and search data about Latin and Greek epigraphy on amphoras for food transportation, and it will cover: (i) a theoretical-oriented section introducing the usage of the OBDA paradigm (Ontology-Based Data Access and Integration) in the context of the historical research; (ii) the EPNet integration effort, and the OBDA implementation; (iii) a demo section based on examples of SPARQL-based querying over the EPNet dataset; (iv) an introduction on the interactive, web-based interface for data exploration, providing non-technical users the means to easily access multi-dimensional, heterogenous datasets, for research hypotheses testing and validation.