[Colin Greenstreet]

The MarineLives project uses a semantic media wiki as its platform to view and transcribe manuscript images, to annotate transcribed pages, and to create semantic biographies. RDF data are available for download and reuse by other researchers. All data downloadable on a CC BY 3.0 licence.

 

The MarineLives wiki is built on a PHP-based stack:
– Media Wiki
– Semantic MediaWiki extension to allow storage and querying of data across pages
– Semantic Forms extension to allow editing of pages as structured data
– Custom extensions for folio navigation, basic transcription, and improved behaviour to match transcription expectations.

 

The curent wiki was migrated in early 2015 from a collection of separate wikis; historically the wiki was set up with relatively unstructured data from one wiki site per volume of depositions (witness statements) and several further wikis for cross volume analysis. An importer took the data from each wiki and converted to structured data on a single wiki, with the analysis wikis moved to namespaced pages.

 

The technology interests of the MarineLives project team include:

1. Semi-automated recognition of handwritten manuscripts, using tools from the Transkribus suite. The base software is written in Java, and currently has a number of client approaches in Java together with a JS+ LAMP platform known as a Transcriptorium which uses the Transkribus web services.
2. Tailored and semantic search.
3. Visualisation and mapping of historical data. We are interested in visualising and mashing data both from the MarineLives corpus and from external sources. Data may be in textual, numeric, visual or map format.  Data may come from custom data sets, or semantic/annotated data read live from the wiki using normal MediaWiki APIs, or more likely the Ask API from Semantic MediaWiki. Custom extensions presenting data transformed from internal APIs could also be used as a data source, but transformation and presentation after that could take many forms.

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