This group has been created to explore the creation of an inclusive open-source historical mapping community, with a focus on Early Modern London, Early Modern England and Wales, Ireland and Scotland, and their relations with the wider world. It is an initiative of the MarineLives project team. The MarineLives project was launched in 2012 to work collaboratively on the transcription, linkage and enrichment of the legal records of the English High Court of Admiralty. We welcome academics and non-academics to contribute to this group, which is hosted on the Humanities Commons platform, and to advance a culture of exchange of data sets, map layers, polygons, georeferenced data and methodologies.
Linked open data from MarineLives semantic media wiki for experimentation
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The MarineLives project uses a semantic media wiki as its platform to view and transcribe manuscript images, to annotate transcribed pages, and to create semantic biographies. All semantic biographies contain geographical location data. For example, semantic biographies for the hamlet of Limehouse in the parish of Stepney in the county of Middlesex. RDF data are available for download and reuse by other researchers. All data downloadable on a CC BY 3.0 licence.
The MarineLives wiki is built on a PHP-based stack:
– Media Wiki
– Semantic MediaWiki extension to allow storage and querying of data across pages
– Semantic Forms extension to allow editing of pages as structured data
– Custom extensions for folio navigation, basic transcription, and improved behaviour to match transcription expectations.The current wiki was migrated in early 2015 from a collection of separate wikis; historically the wiki was set up with relatively unstructured data from one wiki site per volume of depositions (witness statements) and several further wikis for cross volume analysis. An importer took the data from each wiki and converted to structured data on a single wiki, with the analysis wikis moved to namespaced pages.
The technology interests of the MarineLives project team include:
- Semi-automated recognition of handwritten manuscripts, using tools from the Transkribus suite. The base software is written in Java, and currently has a number of client approaches in Java together with a JS+ LAMP platform known as a Transcriptorium which uses the Transkribus web services.
- Tailored and semantic search.
- Visualisation and mapping of historical data. We are interested in visualising and mashing data both from the MarineLives corpus and from external sources. Data may be in textual, numeric, visual or map format. Data may come from custom data sets, or semantic/annotated data read live from the wiki using normal MediaWiki APIs, or more likely the Ask API from Semantic MediaWiki. Custom extensions presenting data transformed from internal APIs could also be used as a data source, but transformation and presentation after that could take many forms.
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- Only members can participate in this group's discussions.