We’ve written about the pleiades project a couple of times before:

Organized by the Ancient World Mapping Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, U.S.A., Pleiades brings together a global community of scholars, students and enthusiasts to expand and enhance continually the information originally brought together by the Classical Atlas Project (1988-2000) to support the publication of the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World (R.J.A. Talbert, ed., Princeton, 2000).

Last month they released the first batch of their data, and what a great job they’re doing. The material is impeccably laid out, in particular:

• They’ve ensured there’s a proper open license on each collection of material (in this case a CC Attribution license)
• They’ve made the material available in bulk as well as through a search facility

More information about the datasets available as well as links can be found on the pleiades site or on the ckan pleiades package page. This really is a perfect example of what an open knowledge project can be and so a big well done to the pleiades team for the work so far (and long may it continue!).

Related posts:

1. Opening Up Ancient Geodata: The Barrington Atlas II I’ve written previously about the Barrington Atlas of the Ancient World which took 12 years to produce (1988-2000). It’s a wonderful example of interdisciplinary collaboration using, as it did, the talents of a multitude of classical scholars as well as...
2. How to Develop Geodata Domain Models Jo Walsh (who’s also a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation) has written a great post over on the mappinghacks blog about the development a new data model for OpenStreetMap. Though focused on the issue of modelling geodata the points...
3. Open Context Officially Launched The Open Context project, “a free, open access resource for the electronic publication of primary field research from archaeology and related disciplines”, was officially launched back on January the 29th: In April 2006, we proudly launched the Beta version of...