Pleiades is an international research network and associated web portal and content management system devoted to the study of ancient geography. Funding for the creation of this software was provided by a grant from the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities.

Description

The "Geo Prime" milestone was structured to demonstrate, in a modified version of the Plone Content Management System, basic geographic capabilities needed by the Project. The custom software we have developed in order to add these capabilities is being released to the public simultaneously under the rubric "Pleiades Software Release 0.6".

Achieving this milestone required more than software development. We also made it our goal to prepare and demonstrate rudimentary, Plone-ready versions of the point features cataloged by the American Philological Association's Classical Atlas Project for presentation in "Map 65 - Lycia-Pisidia" of the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World (R. Talbert, ed., Princeton, 2000). Together with "unlocated" and "false" toponyms reported in the associated Directory, compiled together with the map by C. Foss and S. Mitchell, this dataset numbers over 300 discrete geographic entities and over 300 historic geographic names. The Atlas Project's data have been reformatted as an XML gazetteer, loosely based on the Gazetteer Content Standard outlined by the Alexandria Digital Library Project, wherein they have been united with geographic coordinates created from the compilation map via on-screen digitization in a Geographic Information System (GIS).

The contents of the gazetteer files are imported into Plone, where they reside as "content objects," structured according to the dictates of our custom GeographicEntityLite software product. As such, they can be mapped, modified, subjected to editorial workflow and exported to other formats as provided by the Plone infrastructure and our own custom geospatial products (PleiadesGeocoder and PleiadesOpenLayers).

This milestone and associated software release is the first of many envisioned for the two-year startup phase of the Project. As such, it represents only an initial installment in terms of required capabilities and features. A brief discussion of what the software currently does and does not do is appended to this announcement. Future milestones may be consulted via the Project Roadmap.

Community Action ¶

Members of the Pleiades Community are invited to view and interact with a live demonstration of our software and data at http://icon.stoa.org/pleiades-staging. This server -- made available to us by the Stoa Consortium and the Collaboratory for Research in Computing for Humanities at the University of Kentucky -- is running the release versions of our custom software, and has been populated with the Map 65 point gazetteer dataset.

We encourage all Pleiades affiliates to visit, and log into, the staging portal. By taking a moment to visit the "preferences" page and fill in the "location" field, users will help us test our geocoding and mapping software. The Get Data link on the portal home page will guide users in browsing the test data. Comments and suggestions are highly encouraged as well, and should be posted to the pleiades-community mailing list.

Please note the list of Capabilites and Limitations associated with this milestone.