Berkeley Prosopography Services and CollectionSpace

Berkeley Prosopography Services (BPS) is an open-source prosopographical toolkit that generates interactive visualizations of the biological and social connections that link documented individuals, providing a dynamic and heuristic tool for researching historical communities documented in legal and administrative archives. We are currently exploring and developing a prototype application with a single target corpus, but will soon expand to support multiple corpora. The initial corpus is a set of Hellenistic Babylonian legal texts (cuneiform tablets). I'll describe our architecture and the tools we're using, and describe our plans for the next year or so.

CollectionSpace is a collaboration that brings together a variety of cultural and academic institutions with the common goal of developing and deploying an open-source, web-based software application for the description, management, and dissemination of museum collections information. Berkeley is responsible for the development of the services back-end, which follows seach-engine optomization (SOA) principles adapted to this domain. I'll talk about the overall project architecture and organization, and some of the new approaches we've developed to services architecture, SOA methodology, and SOA governance. Pilot deployments of CollectionSpace are underway with the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, and with the Herbaria collections.

Both of these projects fit into a longer term mission in IST-Data Services to build a platform of reusable, interoperable services that support research and teaching. See Using Natural Language Processing and Social Network Analysis to study ancient Babylonian society and Collection management systems for campus museums: CollectionSpace 0.1 released.