After a four year hiatus in adding content to Kerameikos.org, the project is rebooting for a new phase. Although Kerameikos has been the subject of presentations and articles in 2023 and 2024, the last content to be entered into the vocabulary was Nick Harokopos’ translations of shape definitions into Greek. Recently, shape definition translations into Hebrew were added by University of Virginia student Matan Goldstein.
Today, more than 950 Attic vases from the Ashmolean Museum at the University of Oxford were integrated into the Greek pottery Linked Open Data cloud. The new Ashmolean collections database enables CSV export, which was reconciled in OpenRefine to Kerameikos URIs for shapes, techniques, artists, etc (using the reconciliation APIs that we built for Kerameikos). I should note that only the Attic vases were exported (almost entirely Archaic and Classical), not all objects from the ancient Greek world, so much remains to be integrated from the museum. Additionally, only Black-figure painters and potters have been rigorously defined. There is a smattering of Red-figure artists in Kerameikos from our 2014 prototype (Berlin Painter, Achilles Painter, and a few others), but we have not yet minted URIs for the whole range of Attic Red-figure artists. Therefore, some Ashmolean vases don’t link to artist URIs that have not yet been created.
More than 260 these these vases link to approximately 60 distinct place URIs, defined by Wikidata, improving the geographic visualization of related concepts.
Kerameikos concept pages link to a single Ashmolean example image, although there are IIIF manifests that include multiple photographs. However, it seems there is an issue with their IIIF image server delivering tiles, so a full representation of photography will have to wait until the technical issue is resolved.
Lastly, we have migrated the canonical URIs for Kerameikos concepts and ontology classes and properties (which extend CIDOC-CRM ones) to https. If you are using these URIs in your own database, we recommend replacing http with https.