Clustermeeting of the CC Objects as information carriers

Invitation to the meeting on march 19, 2026

On Thursday, 19 March at 3 p.m. (CET), the NFDI4Objects Community Cluster ‘Objects as Information Carriers’ is hosting a meeting. The topic will be the modeling of inscriptions developed in the ontology of the FAIR Epigraphy Project.

Jonathan Prag and Imran Asif (Oxford) will be presenting this work:

‘A CIDOC-based ontology for Epigraphy: mapping the epigraphic datasphere’

Integrating data from diverse digital epigraphy projects has long been a desideratum, and for Greco-Roman epigraphy was piloted by the EAGLE project (2012-2016). The FAIR Epigraphy project (AHRC-DFG, 2023-2026) has been pursuing a semantic web approach to the problem, developing tools and standards to facilitate data integration (see https://inscriptiones.org/). Our approach operates on the assumption that serialisation into RDF is a meaningful solution to the general problem, especially given the diversity of approaches to data digitisation currently in use. Following on from earlier attempts to build an ontology for epigraphy, including the CRMtex extension to CIDOC, we have developed a preliminary ontology, based on CIDOC-CRM, which we think covers almost the entire epigraphic datasphere, from object and text, to its reproduction, study and publication.

Jonathan Prag is Professor of Ancient History at Merton College, Oxford. He is an expert on Sicily in the Hellenistic-Roman period and has carried out extensive work in this field, including on inscriptions and the transfer of epigraphic information to the Semantic Web.

Imran Asif is a senior research software engineer at the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents in Oxford and is responsible for the technical implementation of digital epigraphy within the FAIR Epigraphy Project.

Link to the event: https://spk-berlin.webex.com/meet/c.klose