MANTO x LIMC

written by Greta Hawes

Digital Ancient World Studies is well provided with data about space, not least through the excellent, ongoing work around Pleiades.

But when it comes to authoritative datasets relating to ancient people, there remains a lot of foundational work still to be done. (Some of this has been taken up by Pelagios’ new People activity.)

One of MANTO’s key roles is to build up a dataset of mythic people that are expertly disambiguated. (We describe how we do this more fully here.) As LOD resources for mythic people emerge, we have been working to align MANTO with them. Digital LIMC recently migrated to a new platform, which provides stable identifiers for the mythic characters that served as the “headwords” in the original volumes. Working with Rita Gautschy, Anika Campbell and I have now checked the alignments that Digital LIMC held to MANTO, and added more links in the other direction too. These now join the other alignments we have to Wikidata and Trismegistos.

At this junction, we make available here a table of the alignments we now hold in MANTO to LIMC and Wikidata, with some Trismegistos alignments included. This table is neither a complete download of the mythic people in MANTO nor a complete record of all possible alignments. Full alignment between these projects would require greater resources than our project currently has. The alignments do, however, show proof of concept for further work in integrating these datasets.

I pay tribute, too, to the extraordinary work being done to improve and expand Wikidata’s coverage of Greek myth, and to Jonathan Groß’ ongoing initiative to index Roscher’s Lexicon for this purpose. This careful blending of digital and legacy material is surely the way forward if we are to create a fully comprehensive resource for ancient mythical people across our LOD ecosystem.