A Quote from the NEH LAWDI Proposal

In February 2011, Tom Elliott, John Muccigrosso and I wrote and submitted a proposal to the NEH's "Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities" program. It was accepted, which is way cool. So on Thursday - the day after tomorrow (yikes!) - we begin the "Linked Ancient World Data Institute" (#LAWDI).

We definitely wrote about RDF, RDFa, SPARQL, etc. But to give you a flavor of what we're trying to achieve, here's a quote from the narrative:

Finally, we stress that it is not our intent to ask LAWDI participants to adhere to a single standard that dictates how each project and discipline brings its intellectual content into digital form. We recognize that existing data is heterogeneous and that many digital humanities projects have invested substantial time and money in creating resources according to their own needs. In this environment, any attempt to create a single unifying standard of data representation will fail and so we have not adopted that language in this proposal. We are also sensitive to the principle that overly detailed standards presume that a discipline knows all that it wants to say about its topic of study. This is certainly not the case for the Ancient World, where the basic terms of analysis continue to change in exciting ways. Of course, recognizing complexity as the starting point of discussions does not mean that useful interoperability cannot be achieved.

I think the above makes a lot of sense at this stage in digitizing the Ancient World. I'd also reformulate the sentiment as "Sure it's your data, but put it on the public internet in such a way that others can make use of it with existing tools and best practices."