Tyler Jo Smith, University of Virginia
Considering the importance of Greek figure-decorated pottery for researchers in the fields of Classics, archaeology, art history, and history, there exist a variety of accessible databases within both museum collections and digital archives, among them the Beazley Archive Pottery Database. While the basic ideas underlying the classification of ancient Mediterranean pottery are shared across languages (e.g., shape, production place, painter, potter, iconography, etc.), there are no firm standards for describing, representing, and publishing pottery datasets on the web. Additionally, due to the wide variation in the native languages of these databases (and lack of consistent, controlled vocabulary even among databases of the same languages), it is difficult to conduct research across multiple systems. Kerameikos.org is a thesaurus that seeks to define the intellectual concepts of Greek pottery according to open web standards. Rather than relying on textual strings as controlled vocabulary (the painter, Exekias, in most Western scholarship is transliterated to 埃克塞基亚斯 in Chinese), concepts are represented by HTTP URIs, following the definition of Linked Open Data (LOD) by Tim Berners-Lee: https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html. By definition these concepts link to identical concepts in other information systems. Kerameikos.org aims to provide a pathway to normalisation for many pottery databases, enabling the large-scale data aggregation and subsequent analyses that are not currently possible within the discipline. While the project is focused primarily on the definition of concepts within Athenian black- and red-figure pottery, Kerameikos.org is extensible toward the definition of concepts in other fields of pottery studies.