Nearly 4000 Getty Museum vases (and fragments) integrated into Kerameikos

Nearly 4000 Getty Museum vases (and fragments) integrated into Kerameikos

Thanks to the help of David Newbury and Brenda Podemski at the Getty Museum, I have managed to integrate nearly 4,000 vases and fragments of vases from the Getty Museum into Kerameikos.org. Using the prototype Getty SPARQL endpoint, I was able to construct a query to extract all vessels created on or before 300 BC. This certainly includes more than our narrower scope of Archaic and Classical Athenian pottery (for example, more than 100 Red-figure Apulian vases), but we can revisit full reconciliation to relevant URIs at a later stage.

The data in the Getty SPARQL endpoint haven't been fully normalized to Getty vocabulary URIs, and so the classifications of production places, materials, and shapes were parsed and reconciled from textual statements in OpenRefine. This process was relatively straightfoward and only took a few hours.

I think spent some time muddling around with OpenRefine GREL conditionals for multiple artists in an export template, which I have uploaded into Gist. When an object has more than one artist that contributed to its production, the main production event consists of (crm:P9_consists_of) two parts, which were carried out by different individuals. You could assign a role to these individuals at the production level, but it can usually be extracted from the SKOS concept of the artist, where we use the W3C org ontology to assign a role of painter and/or potter. Between the Getty and BM data, we probably have enough specimens to map relationships between artists that overlap in their collaboration in producing pottery.

Getty 72.AE.148, a collaboration between Exekias and The Painter of the Vatican Mourner

For example, Douris produced more works with Onesimos than any other artist (see SPARQL query). It wouldn't take more work to build an API on this query that delivers JSON for the d3plus Network visualization library, much like what I've already done for Hellenistic monograms and Roman Republican die links for numismatic projects.

 

Of course, the Getty's images are IIIF, and linking to the IIIF manifest allows us to display and annotate multiple high-resolution images for an object.