Nanopublication beyond the sciences: the PeriodO period gazetteer


Submitted 3 August 2015
Accepted 5 January 2016
Published 3 February 2016

Corresponding author
Patrick Golden,
ptgolden@email.unc.edu

Academic editor
Edward Fox

Additional Information and
Declarations can be found on
page 16

DOI 10.7717/peerj-cs.44

Copyright
2016 Golden and Shaw

Distributed under
Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0

OPEN ACCESS

Nanopublication beyond the sciences: the
PeriodO period gazetteer
Patrick Golden and Ryan Shaw

School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
Chapel Hill, NC, United States

ABSTRACT
The information expressed in humanities datasets is inextricably tied to a wider
discursive environment that is irreducible to complete formal representation.
Humanities scholars must wrestle with this fact when they attempt to publish or
consume structured data. The practice of “nanopublication,” which originated
in the e-science domain, offers a way to maintain the connection between formal
representations of humanities data and its discursive basis. In this paper we describe
nanopublication, its potential applicability to the humanities, and our experience
curating humanities nanopublications in the PeriodO period gazetteer.

Subjects Digital Libraries, World Wide Web and Web Science
Keywords Nanopublication, Periodization, Scholarly communication, Time, Linked data,
JSON-LD

INTRODUCTION
Humanities scholars who wish to make their research materials usable with networked

digital tools face a common dilemma: How can one publish research materials as “data”

without severing them from the ideas and texts that originally gave them meaning?

The kinds of information produced in the humanities—biographical details, political

and temporal boundaries, and relationships between people, places, and events—are

inextricably tied to arguments made by humanities scholars. Converting all, or even

much, of the information expressed in scholarly discourse into algorithmically processable

chunks of formal, structured data has so far proven to be extraordinarily difficult.

But rather than attempt to exhaustively represent her research, a scholar can promote

small pieces of information within her work using the practice of nanopublication (Mons

& Velterop, 2009). Nanopublications include useful and usable representations of the

provenance of structured assertions. These representations of provenance are useful

because they allow consumers of the published data to make connections to other sources

of information about the context of the production of that data. In this way, they strike a

balance between the needs of computers for uniformity in data modeling with the needs of

humans to judge information based on the wider context of its production. An emphasis

on connecting assertions with their authors is particularly well-suited for the needs of

humanities scholars. By adopting nanopublication, creators of datasets in the humanities

can focus on publishing small units of practically useful, curated assertions while keeping

a persistent pointer to the basis of those claims—the discourse of scholarly publishing

itself—rather than its isolated representation in formal logic.

How to cite this article Golden and Shaw (2016), Nanopublication beyond the sciences: the PeriodO period gazetteer. PeerJ Comput.
Sci. 2:e44; DOI 10.7717/peerj-cs.44

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We offer as an example of this approach the PeriodO period gazetteer, which collects

definitions of time periods made by archaeologists and other historical scholars (http:

//perio.do). A major goal of the gazetteer was to make period definitions parsable and

comparable by computers, while also retaining links to the broader scholarly context in

which they were conceived. We found that a nanopublication-centric approach allowed

us to achieve this goal. In this paper, we describe the concept of nanopublication, its

origin in the hard sciences, and its applicability to the humanities. We then describe the

PeriodO period gazetteer in detail, discuss our experience mapping nonscientific data into

nanopublications, and offer advice to other humanities-oriented projects attempting to do

the same.

NANOPUBLICATIONS
Nanopublication is an approach to publishing research in which individual research

findings are modeled as structured data in such a way that they retain information

about their provenance. This is in contrast to both traditional narrative publishing,

where research findings are not typically published in a structured, computer readable

format, and “data dumps” of research findings which are typically published without any

embedded information about their origin or production. The nanopublication approach is

motivated by a desire to publish structured data without losing the wider research context

and the benefits of traditional scholarly communication (Groth, Gibson & Velterop, 2010).

Nanopublication emerged from work in data-intensive sciences like genomics and

bioinformatics, where recent advances in computational measurement techniques have

vastly lowered the barrier to collecting genetic sequencing data. As a result, millions of

papers have been published with findings based on these new methods. However, the

reported results are almost always published in the form of traditional narrative scholarly

publications (Mons et al., 2011). While narrative results can be read and understood by

humans, they are not so easily digested by computers. In fields where computation has

been the key to the ability to ask new and broader questions, it should surely be the case

that research results are published in such a way that they are able to be easily parsed,

collected, and compared by computer programs and the researchers who use them.

On the occasions when research data are released and shared, they are often distributed

on their own, stripped of the context necessary to locate them within a broad research

environment (the identity of the researchers, where and how this research was conducted,

etc.). In this case, publishing practice has swung too far to the opposite extreme. In the

service of creating and sharing discrete datasets, the published results have been stripped of

their provenance and their position within the wider scholarly endeavor that culminated

in their publication. This contextual information is crucial for researchers to determine the

trustworthiness of the dataset and learn about the broader project of research from which

they resulted.

Nanopublication offers a supplementary form of publishing alongside traditional

narrative publications. A nanopublication consists of three parts, all representable by

RDF graphs:

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http://perio.do
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1. An assertion (a small, unambiguous unit of information)

2. The provenance of that assertion (who made that assertion, where, when, etc.)

3. The provenance of the nanopublication itself (who formed or extracted the assertion,

when, and by what method)

The formal definitions of these parts are specified by an OWL ontology (Groth et al.,

2013). By representing their research in nanopublications alongside their narrative reports,

researchers can publish their data in such a way that the data remain within their human

context while also being easily digested by computer programs.

Authors are encouraged to include the smallest possible unambiguous pieces of

information as the assertions at the center of a nanopublication. In the bioscience context,

these assertions could range from statements of causality, to measurements of gene

expressions or gene-disease associations, to statistics about drug interactions. The scope

and nature of appropriate units of nanopublication inevitably vary by discipline. Multiple

statements of identical or closely related facts can be connected with different sources of

provenance, thereby potentially augmenting the ability of consumers to judge the quality

of assertions. Groth, Gibson & Velterop (2010) call the collection of nanopublications all

referring to the same assertion “S-evidence,” and cite the potential benefits of the ability to

automatically connect findings across research publications.

Several European repositories of bioinformatic data have begun to publish their con-

tents as nanopublications, including the Biosemantics Group (http://www.biosemantics.

org), neXtProt (http://nextprot.org/), and DisGeNET (http://www.disgenet.org/web/

DisGeNET/v2.1). These publications can be aggregated and connected in larger systems,

such as the decentralized reputation system described by Kuhn (2015).

NANOPUBLICATION IN THE HUMANITIES
While the bioinformatics research community has enthusiastically adopted nanopub-

lication, other disciplines have been slow to follow. Gradmann (2014) suggested that

specialized and stable terminologies, as well as sufficient funding to organize these

terminologies in formal ontologies, may be prerequisites for the successful deployment of

nanopublication. Thus while he expects other scientific, technical, and medical disciplines

to eventually embrace nanopublication, he is less sure that nanopublication will work for

the humanities. Historians, for example, use relatively little specialized terminology and

pride themselves on their ability to use “ordinary language” to represent the past. Even

when humanities scholars use specialized theoretical language, their use of this language

is often unstable, ambiguous, and highly contested. Perhaps, then, a publishing technique

that seeks to eliminate such ambiguity is ill-suited for these fields.

A related obstacle to the adoption of nanopublication beyond the hard sciences has to

do with differences in the role played by “facts.” Researchers trained in the hard sciences

understand their work to be cumulative: scientists “stand on the shoulders of giants” and

build upon the work of earlier researchers. While scientists can in principle go back and

recreate the experiments of their predecessors, in practice they do this only when the results

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of those experiments have not been sufficiently established as facts. Efficient cumulative

research requires that, most of the time, they simply trust that the facts they inherit work

as advertised. Something like this process seems to be assumed by many proponents

of nanopublications. For example, Mons & Velterop (2009) claim that a major goal of

nanopublication is to “elevate” factual observations made by scientists into standardized

packages that can be accumulated in databases, at least until they are proved wrong.

These standardized packages can then be automatically or semi-automatically analyzed

to produce new factual observations (or hypotheses about potential observations), and the

cycle continues.

Yet as Mink (1966) observed, not all forms of research and scholarship are aimed at

producing “detachable conclusions” that can serve as the basis for a cumulative process of

knowledge production. Anticipating Gradmann, Mink argued that

Detachable conclusions are possible in science because—and only because—of its

theoretical structure. The division of labor in research requires that concepts have

a uniformity of meaning, and the methodological problem of definition therefore

becomes central (Mink, 1966, 39).

Mink contrasted science to the study of history, which, lacking both explicit methodology

and uniform consensus on the meanings of its concepts, does not produce “detachable

conclusions.” But this does not mean that historical scholarship fails to produce knowl-

edge, only that it is a separate and autonomous mode of understanding. The goal of most

historical scholarship is not to establish conclusions by constructing an explanatory chain

of inferences from evidence. Rather the goal is to render what Mink called a “synoptic

judgment,” an interpretive act in which the scholar comes to “see together” the disparate

observable elements of some phenomena as a synthetic whole. The historian who judges

the advent of printing to have constituted a “communications revolution” (Eisenstein,

1979) has not made an inference from the available evidence but has constructed a

particular interpretation of that evidence. To communicate her synoptic judgment to

others, she cannot simply state her conclusions unambiguously and rely on her audience’s

theoretical understanding to make them meaningful; instead she must arrange and exhibit

the evidence to help them “see together” what she saw.

So is nanopublication a poor fit for fields of knowledge production that do not follow

the model of cumulative science? We believe the answer is no. First of all, even Mink did

not argue that there were no facts in history, only that the significant conclusions drawn

by historians do not typically take the form of factual statements. There are plenty of

equivalents in history and the humanities to the databases of curated factual statements

that exists in the sciences: prosopographical databases (Bradley & Short, 2005), digital

historical gazetteers (Elliott & Gillies, 2011), not to mention the catalogs and indexes of

bibliographical data that make humanities scholarship possible (Buckland, 2006). Some of

these facts may be vague or uncertain, but as Kuhn et al. (2013) observe, even knowledge

that cannot be completely formally represented, including vague or uncertain scientific

findings, can benefit from the nanopublication approach. We agree but would go further

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to say that nanopublication is useful even for information that is neither testable nor

falsifiable, exemplified by Mink’s synoptic judgments. We have demonstrated the utility

of nanopublications for describing synoptic judgments of historical periodization in the

PeriodO period gazetteer, which we describe below.

THE PERIODO PERIOD GAZETTEER
In their work, archaeologists and historians frequently refer to time periods, such as the

“Classical Iberian Period” or the “Progressive Era.” These time periods are shorthand

representations of commonly referenced segments of time and space. While time periods

might have commonly understood definitions, they are typically scattered throughout

myriad publications and are treated as shared, assumed knowledge. This leads to

difficulty and repeated effort when scholars want to visualize their data in space and over

time, which requires mapping these discursive period labels to discrete spatiotemporal

ranges (Rabinowitz, 2014).

To build the PeriodO gazetteer, we compiled thousands of definitions of time periods

from published sources within the fields of archaeology, history, and art history. We

mapped these time periods to a consistent data model and published them as linked open

data (Heath & Bizer, 2011) so that future scholars would be able to link their uses of period

terms to information about the provenance of those terms. A web-based faceted browsing

interface allows scholars to find and compare period definitions (see Fig. 3), or software

developers can use the PeriodO data directly in their own systems. The gazetteer is editable

via HTTP; contributors can submit proposed changes in the form of patches, and the

PeriodO editors can accept or reject them. All proposed and accepted changes are stored,

and each period definition has a history of changes in the form of patch submissions and

approvals (Shaw et al., 2015). To ease the process of creating patches that conform to the

PeriodO data model, we developed an editing interface that runs in a standard web browser

(see Fig. 4).

Data model
PeriodO defines a “period definition” as a scholarly assertion about the name and

spatiotemporal extent of a period. The core of a period definition consists of text quoted

from the original source indicating the name of the period, its temporal range, and the

geographic region to which it applies. Multiple period definitions from the same source

are grouped into a period collection. For example, the article “Domestic Architecture and

Social Differences in North-Eastern Iberia during the Iron Age (c.525–200 BC)” includes

the following sentence:

For the Catalan area, the complete system with the four above-mentioned categories

is not as clearly documented before the fourth century as it is during the Classical

Iberian Period (400–200 BC), although differences in the size of the sites, as well as the

specialization of the functions of some settlements, can be already detected during the

Early Iberian Period (525–400 BC) (Belarte, 2008).

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This sentence contains two assertions defining period extents, so it is modeled in PeriodO

as two period definitions. The first definition has the label “Classical Iberian Period” and

its start and end points are labeled as “400 BC” and “200 BC” respectively. The second

definition has the label “Early Iberian Period” and its start and end points are labeled as

“525 BC” and “400 BC” respectively. The spatial extent of both definitions is labeled as

“Catalan area”. All of these labels are taken verbatim from the source text and should never

change.

Because they come from the same source, these two period definitions are grouped

into a period collection. The bibliographic metadata for the source article is associated

with this period collection. (In the event that a source defines only a single period, then

the period collection will be a singleton.) Belonging to the same period collection does

not imply that period definitions compose a periodization. A periodization is a single

coherent, continuous division of historical time, each part of which is labeled with a period

term. A period collection, on the other hand, is simply a set of period definitions that

share the same source. When the period definitions in a period collection do compose

a periodization, this can be indicated through the addition of statements relating the

period definitions to one another, e.g., as belonging to the same periodization and having a

specific ordering.

Because source languages, dating systems, and naming of geographical regions can vary

widely, labels taken verbatim from source documents are insufficient for indexing and

visualizing period definitions in a uniform way. Thus the rest of the PeriodO data model

consists of properties added by PeriodO curators to normalize the semantic content of

these textual labels. First, all periods originally defined in a language other than English are

given an alternate English-language label. When a period definition was originally defined

in English, the alternate label may make minor changes for consistency. For example,

Belarte’s definition of the “Classical Iberian Period” period was given an alternate label

of “Classical Iberian”, removing the word “Period” for brevity and consistency with other

definitions. Next, the specification of temporal start and end points is standardized by

adding ISO 8601 lexical representations of proleptic Gregorian calendar years1: -0399 for

1 Proleptic refers to dates represented in
some calendar system that refer to a time
prior to that calendar’s creation. The
Gregorian calendar was adopted in 1582,
but most of our dates fall in years prior
to that one.

“400 BC” and -0199 for “200 BC”. Finally, descriptions of spatial extent are normalized

by adding references to “spatial things”, typically modern nation-states. In this case both

definitions are linked to the spatial thing identified by http://dbpedia.org/resource/Spain.

The complete PeriodO representation in Turtle of Belarte’s collection of period definitions

is given in Fig. 1.2

2 Turtle is a human-readable syntax for
serializing RDF graphs (Carothers &
Prud’hommeaux, 2014).

PERIODO AS LINKED DATA
We have taken pains to make it easy to work with the PeriodO dataset, particularly

keeping in mind developers who do not use an RDF-based tool stack. The dataset is

published as JSON, which is easily parsed using standard libraries in most programming

environments including, of course, web browsers. But while JSON provides an easy and

convenient way to work with the PeriodO dataset by itself, we knew that many users would

want to combine it with the growing body of scholarly Linked Data being published on

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http://dbpedia.org/resource/Spain
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Figure 1 Turtle representation of a PeriodO period collection containing two period definitions
originally published by Belarte (2008).

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the Web. Most of our initial contributors of period definitions work in archaeology, a

discipline that has several large, well-curated, interlinked, widely used and well-maintained

Linked Data datasets (Isaksen et al., 2014). Thus, we take advantage of the recent W3C

Recommendation of JSON-LD (Sporny, Kellogg & Lanthaler, 2014) to make the PeriodO

dataset available as Linked Data. By providing a JSON-LD context for the PeriodO dataset,

we have made it usable within an RDF-based stack.

RDF vocabularies
The JSON-LD context maps relationships between PeriodO entities to terms from

RDF vocabularies. Of these, the most important is SKOS (Hobbs & Pan, 2006). The

human-readable labels for a PeriodO definition are mapped to the SKOS prefLabel

and altLabel properties, implying that a PeriodO period definition can be interpreted as

a SKOS Concept. The relationship between a period definition and the period collection

to which it belongs is mapped to the SKOS inScheme property, implying that a period

collection is a SKOS ConceptScheme. The relationship between a period collection

and its source is mapped to the DCMI source term, and the various properties in the

bibliographic description of the source are mapped to their own appropriate DCMI terms.

Finally, the relation between a period definition and its geographical extent is mapped to

the DCMI spatial term.

The relationships between a period definition and the start and end of its tem-

poral extent are respectively mapped to the OWL-Time intervalStartedBy and

intervalFinishedBy properties. This implies that a period definition, in addition to

being a SKOS Concept, is an OWL-Time ProperInterval (an interval of time having

non-zero duration). Importantly, it also implies that the start and end of a period

definition’s temporal extent are themselves ProperIntervals, not points or instants.

This is important because the beginnings and endings of historical periods can never be

precisely determined. In the example of the Classical Iberian Period given above, both

the beginning and the end of the period are interpreted as intervals with a duration

of one year. Interpreting period starts and ends as ProperIntervals allows us to

make a distinction between the intervals themselves and their descriptions: though the

intervals themselves are not precisely specifiable, we can create pragmatic OWL-Time

DateTimeDescriptions of them for the purposes of comparison and visualization.

The start and end of a period definition’s temporal extent are themselves intervals with

their own starts and ends, so temporal extent can be associated with a maximum of four

values. This is interoperable with other proposed representations of fuzzy, imprecise,

or uncertain temporal extents, such as the four start, stop, earliest, latest keys

proposed for GeoJSON-LD (Gillies, 2015). In the current PeriodO data set these four

properties only have (ISO 8601) year values, because none of our sources specified

endpoints at a more granular level than year. However, we expect to have finer-grained

values as we add periodizations of more recent history. At that point we will need to

decide upon a unit of representation that makes it simple to compare intervals defined

at different levels of granularity. Adding complexity to time interval expressions will be

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possible without changing our underlying data model because of the flexibility of our

current approach.

The start, latest start, earliest end, end approach enables us to represent the most

common patterns for defining periods found in our sources. For example a period defined

as starting “3000 B.C. (±150 years)” and ending “about 2330 B.C.” can be represented with

three values: −3149, −2849, and −2329. Kauppinen et al. (2010) propose defining curves

over intervals to represent fuzziness, imprecision, or uncertainty in order to maximize

precision and recall with respect to temporal relevance judgments made by experts. We

have chosen not to support such more complex representations at this time because we are

focused primarily on representing periods as defined in textual sources. Natural language is

already a compact and easily indexable way to represent imprecision or uncertainty. Rather

than imposing an arbitrary mapping from natural language to parameterized curves, we

prefer to maintain the original natural language terms used. However if scholars begin

defining periods with parameterized curves (which is certainly possible) then we will

revisit this decision.

Modeling provenance
To model the provenance of period assertions, we used the Provenance Ontology (McGuin-

ness, Lebo & Sahoo, 2013). We record each change to the dataset (a patch) as a

prov:Activity. This Activity has prov:startedAtTime and prov:endedAtTime

values representing timestamps when the patch was sent and accepted, respectively. The

Activity additionally has two prov:used statements: one which refers to the specific

version of the entire dataset to which the patch was applied (for example, http://n2t.

net/ark:/99152/p0d?version=1), and one referring to the patch itself as a prov:Entity.

The patch Entity contains a URL to the JSON-Patch file which resulted in the change

Activity (Nottingham & Bryan, 2013). Finally, the Activity has prov:generated

statements for each of the period collections and period assertions (implied to be of the

type prov:Entity) that were affected by the given patch. Each of these affected entities

has a prov:specializationOf statement that refers to the permanent identifier for the

period assertion or collection (with no particular version specified). If the affected entities

are revisions of an existing entity, they have prov:wasRevisionOf statements that refer to

the version that they were descended from.

We publish a changelog at http://n2t.net/ark:/99152/p0h#changelog that represents the

sequential list of prov:Activity entities that created the current version of the dataset

as an ordered RDF list. In this way, one can reconstruct the origin of each change to the

dataset as a whole, or to individual period assertions.

Minting long-term URLs
In addition to mapping relationships to well-known vocabularies, interpreting PeriodO

as Linked Data requires a way to assign URLs to period collections and definitions. As

shown in Fig. 1, period definitions and period collections in the dataset are given short

identifiers: p06xc6mvjx2 identifies the definition of the Classical Iberian Period, and

p06xc6m identifies the collection to which it belongs. But these identifiers are only useful

Golden and Shaw (2016), PeerJ Comput. Sci., DOI 10.7717/peerj-cs.44 9/18

https://peerj.com/computer-science/
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within the context of the PeriodO dataset; they are not guaranteed to be unique in a global

context and, unless one already has the PeriodO data, one cannot resolve them to obtain

representations of the entities they identify. URLs, on the other hand, are globally unique

and can be resolved using HTTP to obtain representations; this is the core concept behind

Linked Data. So, we need a way to turn the short PeriodO identifiers into URLs.

To turn PeriodO identifiers into URLs we rely on the ARK identifier scheme (Starr et al.,

2012) provided by the California Digital Library (CDL). First, we include in the JSON-LD

context a @base value specifying the base URI (http://n2t.net/ark:/99152/p0) to use when

interpreting the PeriodO dataset as Linked Data. This allows the short PeriodO identifiers

to be interpreted as URLs; for example p06xc6mvjx2 is interpreted as a relative reference

to the URL http://n2t.net/ark:/99152/p06xc6mvjx2. The hostname of this URL (n2t.net)

is the registered name of the CDL’s Name-to-Thing resolver, which is similar to other

name resolution services for persistent URLs such as PURL. We have registered with the

EZID service a single ARK identifier (ark:/99152/p0), providing them with the URL

of the HTTP server currently hosting the canonical PeriodO dataset. Thus any request

to a URL starting with http://n2t.net/ark:/99152/p0 will be redirected to that server.

An HTTP GET to http://n2t.net/ark:/99152/p0d.jsonld will return the entire dataset,

while GETting (for example) http://n2t.net/ark:/99152/p06xc6mvjx2.jsonld will return a

JSON-LD representation of Belarte’s definition of the “Classical Iberian Period.”

PERIOD ASSERTIONS AS NANOPUBLICATIONS
We created the PeriodO dataset based on the same core concerns of nanopublication

authors: to extract, curate, and publish small, computable concepts from their broader

sources while still preserving their provenance. A nanopublication is made up of an

assertion, the provenance of that assertion, and the provenance of the nanopublication

itself. In PeriodO, these are:

• Assertion: the definition of a period.

• Provenance: the source this period was derived from. This may be a citation of a printed
work or a URL for a resource hosted on the web.

• Provenance of nanopublication: the history of the period definition within the
PeriodO system, including the date it was added or changed, the identity of the person

who submitted or changed it, and the identity of the person who approved additions or

changes.

Figure 1 shows two period definitions with the same provenance. Each of these

definitions is represented by an individual nanopublication. The nanopublication for

the “Early Iberian Period” is shown in Fig. 2. While PeriodO period definitions readily

map to the nanopublication scheme, we faced several challenges during our creation of the

dataset due to its interpretive nature.

The unfalsifiable nature of time period definitions
The current version of the Nanopublication Guidelines includes a note suggesting that the

guidelines be amended to state that an assertion published as a nanopublication should be

Golden and Shaw (2016), PeerJ Comput. Sci., DOI 10.7717/peerj-cs.44 10/18

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Figure 2 Nanopublication of Belarte (2008)’s definition of the “Early Iberian Period”.

“a proposition that is falsifiable, that is to say we can test whether the proposition is true

or false” (Groth et al., 2013). Were this amendment to be made, PeriodO nanopublications

would be in violation of the guidelines, as period definitions in PeriodO, like most of the

information produced in the humanities, are neither testable nor falsifiable. Consider the

Golden and Shaw (2016), PeerJ Comput. Sci., DOI 10.7717/peerj-cs.44 11/18

https://peerj.com/computer-science/
http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.44


assertion “there is a period called the Late Bronze Age in Northern Europe, and it lasted

from about 1100 B.C. to 500 B.C.” The “Late Bronze Age” is a purely discursive construct.

There was no discrete entity called the “Late Bronze Age” before it was named by those

studying that time and place. Consequently, one cannot disprove the idea that there was a

time period called the “Late Bronze Age” from around 1100 B.C. to 500 B.C.; one can only

argue that another definition has more credence based on non-experimental, discursive

arguments.

The proposed falsifiability requirement makes sense in certain contexts. Computational

biologists, for example, wish to connect, consolidate, and assess trillions of measurements

scattered throughout a rapidly growing body of research findings. Their goal is to create

a global, connected knowledge graph that can be used as a tool for scientists to guide new

discoveries and verify experimental results. In the PeriodO context, however, we are not

concerned with making an exhaustive taxonomy of “correct” periods or facilitating the

“discovery” of new periods (a non sequitur—there are no periods that exist in the world

that are awaiting discovery by some inquiring historian or archaeologist). Instead we are

interested in enabling the study and citation of how and by whom time has been segmented

into different periods. It is not necessary that these segmentations be falsifiable to achieve

this goal; they only need to be comparable.

Kuhn et al. (2013) expressed concern that requiring formal representation for all

scientific data published as nanopublications “seems to be unrealistic in many cases

and might restrict the range of practical application considerably.” Similarly, requiring

assertions to be unambiguous and falsifiable would unnecessarily restrict the practical

application of nanopublication. The nature of nanopublication assertions should

ultimately be determined by the practical needs of the researchers who use them. What

is important about nanopublications is not the nature of the assertions, but the expression

of provenance. Provenance is particularly important for non-scientific datasets, since the

assertions made are so dependent on their wider discursive context. When assertions

cannot be tested experimentally, understanding context is critical for judging quality,

trustworthiness, and usefulness.

The critical role of curation
Another difference between the PeriodO dataset and traditional nanopublications is the

unavoidable curatorial work necessary to extract practically useful assertions from textual

period definitions. In all of the applications of nanopublications we found, the published

assertions typically appeared in the form of measurements or well-defined relationships

between discrete entities. These are types of data which humans or computers can easily

and reliably extract from research findings. Our dataset, in contrast, required explicit

curatorial decisions: a time period exists within a certain spatiotemporal context, and there

is no sure way to discretely, accurately, and unambiguously model such boundaries. While

a human might be able to have a nuanced understanding of temporary and ever-shifting

political boundaries or the uncertain and partially arbitrary precision suggested by

“around the beginning of the 12th century BC,” we cannot assume the same of computers.

Golden and Shaw (2016), PeerJ Comput. Sci., DOI 10.7717/peerj-cs.44 12/18

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http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.44


Therefore, in order for our dataset to be readily algorithmically comparable, we had

to map discursive concepts to discrete values. Our curatorial decisions in this regard

reflect a compromise between uniformity, potential semantic expressiveness, and practical

usefulness.

As humanities scholars publish their own nanopublications (or linked data in general),

they will go through similar curatorial processes due to the interpretive, unstandardized

nature of humanities datasets discussed above. There is a temptation in this process to

imagine perfect structured descriptions that could express all possible nuances of all

possible assertions. However, chasing that goal can lead to overcomplexity and, in the

end, be practically useless. In describing period assertions as linked data, we adopted a

schema that was only as semantically complicated as was (a) expressed in our collected

data and (b) necessitated by the practical needs of our intended users. As we started to

collect data, we considered the basic characteristics of a dataset that would be necessary to

accomplish the retrieval and comparison tasks that our intended users told us were most

important. These tasks included:

• Finding how the definition of periods have differed across time/authors, or finding

contested period definitions. (“How have different authors defined the Early Bronze

Age?”)

• Finding all periods within a certain span of time. (“What time periods have been used to

describe years between 100 AD to 500 AD?”).

• Finding all periods within a certain geographic area. (“What time periods have scholars

used in Northern Europe?”)

• Finding periods defined for different languages. (“What time periods have been defined

in Ukranian?”)

Figure 3 shows how these various tasks can be completed using the faceted browsing in-

terface to the PeriodO dataset. Implementing this interface required imposing consistency

upon how we represented the temporal and spatial coverage of period definitions, even

though this consistency does not exist in the original sources.

Our initial approach to imposing consistency on temporal extents was to express the

termini of periods as Julian Days represented in scientific notation. Julian Days are a

standard form of time measurement commonly used by astronomers to represent dates in

the far historical past. Julian Days work by counting the number of continuous days that

have passed since January 1, 4713 BC in the Proleptic Julian calendar. Conceptually, this

is a similar measurement to the common Unix time standard, which counts the number

of milliseconds that have passed since midnight GMT on January 1, 1970. The idea is that

by counting forward using well-defined units since an accepted epoch, one can escape

the inconsistencies and periodic lapses that characterize different calendrical systems.

Representing Julian Days using scientific notation allows one to express variable levels of

uncertainty. See examples of this notation system in Table 1.

However, in practice, we found this scheme to be overly complex. The imposition of a

level of uncertainty, while theoretically useful in certain cases, was often not appropriate.

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http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.44


Figure 3 Finding and comparing period definitions in PeriodO. Searching for “early bronze” (1) results in sixty period definitions with matching
labels (2), from a variety of sources (3). The time range facet (4) updates to show the distribution of temporal extents defined by these various
sources. Users can query for period definitions with temporal extents within a specific range of years using the time range facet (5), period definitions
with spatial extents within a named geographic area using the spatial coverage facet (6), or period definitions in specific languages using the language
facet (7). Queries may combine values from any of these facets.

Table 1 Example scientific notation of Julian days.

Scientific notation Julian day (JDN) Proleptic gregorian

1.3E6 Between JDN 1,250,000 and JDN 1,350,000 1150 BC ± 150 years

1.30E6 Between JDN 1,295,000 and JDN 1,305,000 1150 BC ± 15 years

1.300E6 Between JDN 1,299,500 and JDN 1,300,500 1150 BC ± 1.5 years

In almost every single case that we observed, authors did not explicitly state a precise level

of uncertainty for their temporal expressions. By adding precise uncertainty ourselves,

we would, in effect, have been putting words in authors’ mouths. Further, Julian Days are

not widely used outside of very specific disciplines, meaning that consumers of our data

would have to convert to a more familiar time system before being able to understand or

use our data. Instead of the Julian Day model, we settled on the four-part ISO date schema,

described above. This model is less expressive for complicated forms of uncertainty, but

it is less complex and more easily understood by both our target audience and typical

software programs. ISO dates were simple to convert to, since nearly all of the period

assertions we observed were drawn from sources based on Western calendars. If and when

we encounter period definitions that require more complex time expressions or are based

on varying calendrical systems, we will revisit the question of whether the four-part scheme

is sufficient.

Golden and Shaw (2016), PeerJ Comput. Sci., DOI 10.7717/peerj-cs.44 14/18

https://peerj.com/computer-science/
http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.44


Figure 4 Part of the interface for editing period definitions. Labels for temporal extent boundaries
are taken verbatim from the source, entered as free text, and automatically parsed into ISO 8601 year
representations. Labels for spatial coverage are entered as free text, and using an autocompletion interface
the user can specify the modern-day administrative units (e.g., nation-states) that approximate this
spatial coverage.

To encourage a consistent representation of temporal extent for all period definitions,

we built a simple grammar and parser for date expressions that covered the vast majority

of our sample data. The parser takes in a string like “c. mid-12th century” and outputs a

JSON string consistent with our data model. It can also produce naı̈ve interpretations of

descriptions like “mid-fifth century,” assigning them to the third of the epoch described

according to the conventional segmentation of “early,” “mid,” and “late,” “Mid-fifth

century” would, then, be parsed as the range of years 401–434. The parser is intended

to be used interactively, as a generator of suggestions for standard ways to represent

certain forms of time description. To keep the quality of the gazetteer high, we do not

intend for the parser to be used to fully automatically “extract” period definitions from

texts. Similarly, we created an autocomplete interface to modern political entities to

allow users to enter spatial coverage. These interface components help curators produce a

practical approximation of spatiotemporal coverage rather than a complete, unambiguous

representation. The interface we created to allow users to add and edit period definitions is

shown in Fig. 4.

PROJECT STATUS AND FUTURE WORK
As of late 2015, we have gathered just over 3,500 period definitions from 78 sources,

including monographs, journal articles, and online databases. Each period has been

assigned a permanent URL, which can be resolved to view its definition and provenance

as HTML, JSON-LD, or Turtle. Several projects have begun to use our gazetteer to

add spatiotemporal information to their work, including the Open Context research

data repository (http://opencontext.org), the ARIADNE archaeological research data

infrastructure project (http://ariadne-infrastructure.eu), and the Portable Antiquities

Scheme database of archaeological finds in the UK (https://finds.org.uk).

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http://opencontext.org
http://opencontext.org
http://opencontext.org
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http://opencontext.org
http://opencontext.org
http://opencontext.org
http://opencontext.org
http://opencontext.org
http://opencontext.org
http://opencontext.org
http://ariadne-infrastructure.eu
http://ariadne-infrastructure.eu
http://ariadne-infrastructure.eu
http://ariadne-infrastructure.eu
http://ariadne-infrastructure.eu
http://ariadne-infrastructure.eu
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http://ariadne-infrastructure.eu
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http://ariadne-infrastructure.eu
http://ariadne-infrastructure.eu
http://ariadne-infrastructure.eu
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https://finds.org.uk
https://finds.org.uk
https://finds.org.uk
https://finds.org.uk
https://finds.org.uk
https://finds.org.uk
https://finds.org.uk
https://finds.org.uk
https://finds.org.uk
https://finds.org.uk
https://finds.org.uk
https://finds.org.uk
https://finds.org.uk
https://finds.org.uk
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http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.44


As more projects begin to integrate PeriodO identifiers for time periods, we hope to

gather information on their citation and use. This would include both studying the histor-

ical use of attributed period definitions as well as tracking the citation of PeriodO period

identifiers going forward. Such a study would allow us to observe how periods come into

circulation and fall out of favor. Tracing the connections fostered by use of our gazetteer

would demonstrate the potential benefits of a linked data approach in the humanities.

We are also in the process of reaching out to period-defining communities beyond

classical archaeology and ancient history. We expect that this will require some extensions

of and revisions to the current PeriodO data model. First, as we begin to collect definitions

of periods closer to the present, we expect to extend our model of temporal extent to

allow for more fine-grained interval boundaries than years. This will require a unit of

representation that allows comparisons between intervals defined at different levels of

granularity. (The approach based on Julian Days, described in Table 1, may be useful for

this.) Second, as we begin to include more non-Western period definitions, we will need

to ensure that we can still map years to ISO 8601 representations. At the very least, this

will require extending the temporal expression parser, and it may require changes to the

data model as well, for example to state explicitly the calendar system used by the original

authors. Finally, as more historians begin publishing their work as datasets or software, we

may begin to encounter periods defined not in natural language but using some formalism,

such as the curves proposed by Kauppinen et al. (2010). These will require us to find a way

of including these formalisms directly in our definitions.

CONCLUSION
As scholars of all disciplines continue to integrate computational methods into their work,

the need to preserve provenance will only become more important. This is as true in the

humanities and social sciences as it is in the natural sciences. Nanopublication is an useful

way to locate the production of “data” within a wider scholarly context. In this way, it

echoes old ideas about hypertext which were concerned with relations of provenance,

authorship, and attribution (Nelson, 1999). The PeriodO period gazetteer shows that this

approach is relevant and feasible even to fields outside of the experimental, observable

sciences.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION AND DECLARATIONS

Funding
This work was generously funded by a Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant from the

National Endowment for the Humanities (grant number HD-51864-14). The funders had

no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of

the manuscript.

Grant Disclosures
The following grant information was disclosed by the authors:

National Endowment for the Humanities: HD-51864-14.

Golden and Shaw (2016), PeerJ Comput. Sci., DOI 10.7717/peerj-cs.44 16/18

https://peerj.com/computer-science/
http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.44


Competing Interests
The authors declare there are no competing interests.

Author Contributions
• Patrick Golden and Ryan Shaw conceived and designed the experiments, performed the

experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the

paper, prepared figures and/or tables, performed the computation work, reviewed drafts

of the paper.

Data Availability
The following information was supplied regarding data availability:

PeriodO dataset: http://n2t.net/ark:/99152/p0.

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http://dx.doi.org/10.3233/ISU-2010-0613
http://www.nanopub.org/2013/WD-guidelines-20131215/
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http://www.nanopub.org/2013/WD-guidelines-20131215/
http://www.nanopub.org/2013/WD-guidelines-20131215/
http://dx.doi.org/10.2200/S00334ED1V01Y201102WBE001
http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-owl-time-20060927/
http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-owl-time-20060927/
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http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.44

	Nanopublication beyond the sciences: the PeriodO period gazetteer
	Introduction
	Nanopublications
	Nanopublication in the Humanities
	The PeriodO Period Gazetteer
	Data model

	PeriodO as Linked Data
	RDF vocabularies
	Modeling provenance
	Minting long-term URLs

	Period Assertions as Nanopublications
	The unfalsifiable nature of time period definitions
	The critical role of curation

	Project Status and Future Work
	Conclusion
	References