Our History
Kerameikos.org is a collaborative project dedicated to defining the intellectual concepts of Archaic and Classical Greek pottery, commonly called “vases”, following the methodologies of Linked Open Data (LOD). Kerameikos.org allows for the normalization and aggregation of disparate museum and archaeological datasets into an information system that facilitates broader public access. Through the project, thousands of objects from several institutions that adhere to Open Data principles are available for analysis by museums, archaeologists, historians, and Greek pottery students and specialists.
Project History
Kerameikos.org was inspired by the success of the application of Linked Open Data principles to the study of coinage through the Nomisma.org project and other American Numismatic Society (ANS) projects built on the Hellenistic Royal Coinages project and Nomisma-Online Coins of the Roman Empire (OCRE) and the (both funded by the NEH). Looking to Nomisma.org as a guide, Gruber and Smith began the Kerameikos.org project in Fall 2013 while Gruber participated in a Greek Vase-Painting graduate seminar taught by Smith at the University of Virginia. Like numismatics, Greek pottery is a discipline with a similar, rigorous classification system, and so the project was started by creating identifiers for about 60 different concepts in a small range of categories: production places, artists, shapes, styles, time periods, materials, and several others.
After several years of development and prototyping, Kerameikos.org received a National Endowment for the Humanities Level II Digital Humanities Advancement Grant in Fall 2018. With the aid of the Advancement Grant and with a Scientific Committee including Vladimir Alexiev, Thomas Mannack, and Anne-Violaine Szabados, the team was able to enhance the scope of Linked Open Greek Pottery to encompass the concepts of Archaic and Classical Greek vase-painting and build a more comprehensive platform for research. Initially intended to be undertaken in an 18-month time frame, with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, the project’s Principal Investigator, Dr. Tyler Jo Smith (University of Virginia), applied for and received an extension to disburse our budget at a later date. Ultimately, our NEH-funded phase has concluded as a three-year project with our results presented virtually at the Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archeology conference (CAA) held in Limassol, Cyprus in June 2021.
In the current phase of the project (2026), we are completing our corpus of definitions and translating our content into several languages (including modern Greek, German, and Chinese).
Thank you to our sponsors for their generous support
