Pleiades Data for Download

 [First posted in AWOL 18 October 2013, updated 29 April 2015]

Pleiades Data for Download

Creators: Sean Gillies

Contributors: Brian Turner, Tom Elliott

Copyright © The Contributors. Sharing and remixing permitted under terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (cc-by).

Last modified Mar 19, 2014 11:47 AM

Get complete and regular shapshots of all Pleiades resources, available in multiple formats including CSV, KML, and RDF.

CSV Tables

Each morning, tables summarizing published locations, names, and places are written to gzipped CSV files at http://atlantides.org/downloads/pleiades/dumps/. Text in these files is UTF-8 encoded; some CSV readers (e.g., Microsoft Excel) assume ASCII encoding for CSV files, so be careful!
We keep a week's worth of files, deleting older ones. The files named pleiades-*-latest.csv.gz are symbolically linked to the most recent catalog dumps. The schemas of these files are documented in a README. The resources under http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/ remain the canonical ancient world resources; the contents of the tables are only thin slices. The recently modified page or its corresponding RSS feed are the best ways to track what is changing in these daily dumps.
In addition to the individual resource editorial workflow, the Pleiades project is developing a workflow for updating resources in bulk using modified subsets of these dumped tables. After manipulating the names table in Google Refine, we've successfully updated the attested time periods of 2071 ancient names. We expect to be able to guide tables modified by users through this same process soon.

KML

All mappable places are read from our catalog and written to a zipped KML (KMZ) file each morning. We keep a week's worth of files at http://atlantides.org/downloads/pleiades/kml/ and delete older ones.

RDF

The latest data for all places, errata, authors, place types, and time periods in a compressed tar archive is available at http://atlantides.org/downloads/pleiades/rdf/pleiades-latest.tar.gz. Previous dumps are also available at http://atlantides.org/downloads/pleiades/rdf/.
Data for individual places can be had from links on the place pages, such as http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/579885/turtle for Athens, or by a negotiated request for the resource http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/579885#this. Please see the README in https://github.com/isawnyu/pleiades-rdf for a description of the RDF and the vocabularies and ontologies used.

Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network

Pleiades data can also be downloaded from the CKAN Data Hub: http://thedatahub.org/dataset/pleiades.

Pleiades Plus

Pleiades Plus is an experimental machine alignment between Pleiades place resources and content in the Geonames Gazetteer. It pairs Pleiades URIs with Geonames URIs when a given pair seems likely to identify the same place. This alignment was conceived and prototyped by Leif Isaksen (University of Southampton/Pelagios Project) under the auspices of the Google Ancient Places project (you can read the original announcement from 2011 on the GAP Blog). The current version is produced daily by Ryan Baumann (Duke Collaboratory for Classics Computing). Code and data are available from https://github.com/ryanfb/pleiades-plus. You can download the latest versions of the data at http://atlantides.org/downloads/pleiades/plus/. There is also an essential README file.