15 Trismegistos: Optimizing Interoperability for Texts from the Ancient World

Abstract

Although its origins lie with the Prosopographia Ptolemaica, a project studying people who lived in Ptolemaic Egypt (332–30 BCE), Trismegistos has developed into an interdisciplinary platform for the study of the ancient world in general, from 800 BCE to 800 CE: texts, places, people, collections. Setting up this very divergent set of databases has only been possible through the availability of full text corpora, new digital processing techniques, and the “exponentiality” permitted by interconnectivity. By bringing everything together in a single environment, Trismegistos has facilitated quantitative studies of several phenomena, but this approach remains promising and will hopefully become more widespread. TM’s main aim, however, is interoperability through the spread of stable identifiers, as an instrument to build a Linked Open Data environment for the ancient world.