The Pompeii Artistic Landscape Project and the consequences of Open Data Practice

Since 2019, the Pompeii Artistic Landscape Project (PALP) has worked to create an online resource, using Linked Open Data practices and formats, to encourage sitewide discovery, mapping, analysis, as well as sharing of information about Pompeian artworks in their architectural contexts. Over the last three years, these efforts have required the transformation of a vast corpus of data about the artworks at Pompeii, including published catalogs, mapping data, and tens of thousands of images, by means of an equally large array of tools, programs, and platforms, both bespoke and commercial. Thus, when its initial formulation is complete in the spring of 2023, PALP will exist as a set of online image catalogs, as a triplestore with millions of individual statements about Pompeii’s artworks, as a web-based platform for accessing these images and statements, and as a collection of project infrastructures that served the creation of the other three.

Despite (or perhaps) because our end goal is a widely accessible, robust, and easy to use set of academic resources, our experiences working on PALP also provided an opportunity to reflect on the consequences for institutions of “open data practices” that require new ways of creating data, new ways of recreating data, and new ways of delivering / interacting with data. This paper explores these consequences in three areas: first, the transformation of legacy data (broadly defined) and its implications for future data production and publication; second, the publication, archiving, and circulation of project data over multiple time scales and via various mechanisms of dissemination; and finally, the treatment of project infrastructures, alongside project data, as an outcome of academic research.