What?

• A resource development project that will confront a unique challenge in the gazetteer eco-system: a gazetteer of historical roads to support the creation of linked open road datasets.
• The alignment process will be done not just by places conceptualised as dots, but through unique roads or road segments connecting sets of places.
• Linking with other Pleiades-linked resources will be enabled based on the places associated with each road (segment) URI.
• This project is a proof-of-concept to allow implementing the proposed methodology to the full spectrum of historical road networks by a community of users.
• The method will be tested by adding a new data resource linked to Pelagios: the most up-to-date and accurate digital dataset of Roman roads in the Iberian Peninsula.

How? – Innovation

• Change of perspective: in this gazetteer the roads become nodes and the places become edges.
• URIs will identify routes documented in historical sources. Within each element, relevant information will be stored: places, chronology, bibliography, images…

Impact?

• Enhance the currently limited aggregation and openness of digitised information about historical routes.
• Support all future research on historical roads by providing the first platform with unique references to road (segments).
• Establish a focal point for the community of those interested in historic roads, enabling discussion, adding roads and sources, and correcting them.
• These resources will facilitate future historic road data collection and improve the accuracy of existing road datasets.

Until now, the most common way of approaching the study of communication routes has been to focus on the places where the routes started, ended and passed through. This approach is crucial and partly inevitable, but Itiner-e will explore an alternative to this.

The novelty in this project is that each possible route between every pair of places is understood as a single element that is either historically documented or not, but can all be unambiguously referred to. In other words, it is not the sets of places conceptualised as points that create a route, but the opposite: we conceptualise routes as entities connected through places. Each potential route between a pair of places can receive a unique URI to refer to it, if it is historically documented or merely mentioned. Doing so will enable for each route (segment) the linking of historical documentation, GIS vector-based descriptions of its physical path, photos and other research outputs. Doing so stimulates debate and multivocality of opinion, but it also enables the documentation of different chronological phases of the same route. It will be possible to observe how a locality has some links with other places at a certain moment and how subsequently these relationships change.

Each of the created elements (tracks) will configure a new online gazetteer item accessible and linked with other sources of information such as Pleiades. In this way, it will be possible from any existing node in a route to quickly visualize all the information of the set: to which way (or routes) it belongs in a certain moment or in several moments; which cities or settlements are related to it; explore the role this place played in the global network, etc.

The pipeline method for linked open road data and the creation of the gazetteer will be tested through a model focused on the Roman Roads of the Iberian Peninsula. This case was selected due to the diversity and richness of the resources as well as the availability of the most up-to-date knowledge on these routes through the Mercator-e project led by Pau de Soto. In these territories we can find different Roman roads attested in ancient written and depicted sources such as the Vicarello Cups, the Itinerarium Antonini Augusti, and the Tabula Peutingeriana. The Mercator-e project additionally collected all archaeological and historical traces of all route segments to create the most accurate and up-to-date digital resource of physical routes in the Roman Iberian Peninsula. However, this dataset is not currently linked open data.

Through the Itiner-e gazetteer and the places associated with routes, this data resource will be linked with other Gazetteer projects such as Pleiades (https://pleiades.stoa.org/) and the TIR-FOR Project (https://tir-for.iec.cat/the-map/). All the data generated will be stored in GeoJson format where all the information will be stored (id names, places within the roads, chronology, etc…)