Linked Open Data for Ancient Names and People

This chapter discusses the kinds of information that are recorded about persons and names from antiquity and other periods of pre-modern history, and the ways in which this information can usefully be modelled in Linked Open Data and integrated with the Linked Ancient World Data graph. It begins by introducing some key concepts, in particular the importance of understanding data ‘modelling,’ and limiting the scope of the discussion to fairly basic information about historical persons. The body of the paper summarises the main trends in recording and encoding prosopographical, onomastic and other personal data in previous and current scholarship, both traditional and digital. As an example of the use of Linked Open Data to encode person- and name-data, the recommendations of the SNAP:DRGN project are outlined, noting that these are designed only to represent a small set of disambiguation data to enable interoperability and cross-platform searching among projects, rather than the full richness of prosopographical and onomastic data. The chapter concludes by pointing out the limitations of the current model, and suggesting some areas for future work and development.