Ontoterminology of Hellenistic Events

Overview

The Hellenistic age runs from the death of Alexander in 323 BCE to the naval battle of Actium in 31 BCE — the wars of the successors, the emergence of the Hellenistic kingdoms and dynasties, and the extension of Roman power across the Mediterranean. This ontoterminology models the period's major events together with the agents who took part in them.

Its distinctive move is the source dimension: events and people are linked to the primary sources and the ancient writers who recorded them, so a query can ask not only what happened but on whose authority we know it.

Scope

Access the data

Query it through the SPARQL endpoint using this named graph:

Ways in

• SPARQL endpoint: browser interface, no setup
• OTV Ontology Viewer: browse the class hierarchy
• RDF Graph Viewer: explore as a network
• Download the RDF/OWL and .otb files

The .otb file opens in TEDI; the .rdf file opens in Protégé, and can be visualised with WebVOWL.

Example queries

Who were the agents of the Wars of the Successors?

Returns the definition of war together with everyone recorded as an agent of the Wars of the Successors.

PREFIX rdf:    <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#>
PREFIX skos:   <http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#>
PREFIX rdfs:   <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#>
PREFIX events: <http://www.ontologia.fr/OTB/Events-hellenistic-v.1.0#>
PREFIX otv:    <http://www.ontologia.fr/OTB/otv#>
PREFIX foaf:   <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/>

SELECT DISTINCT ?definition ?agentExLabel
FROM <https://triplestore.talos-ai4ssh.uoc.gr:8890/datasets/Modeling-Events-Hellenistic-Period-v1>
WHERE {
  ?warURI rdfs:label     "war"@en ;
          skos:definition ?definition.
  FILTER(langMatches(lang(?definition), "en"))

  ?warEx  rdfs:label      "wars of the succesors"@en ;
          events:hasAgent ?agentEx.
  ?agentEx rdfs:label     ?agentExLabel.
}
ORDER BY ?agentExLabel

The query is doing two things at once: pulling the general definition of the concept war, and pulling the participants in one specific war.

events:hasAgent is the property to change to ask other questions of this dataset. Substitute a different event label to get its participants, or drop the second block entirely to return only the definitions.

Size & structure

Citation & licence

Cite as

Lourentzaki, A., Papadopoulou, M., & Roche, C. (2024).
Ontoterminology of Hellenistic Events v.1.0 (Version 1.0) [Dataset].
Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13371204

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.13371204

Licence

CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Funding

European Commission, TALOS AI4SSH, grant agreement 101087269.

Credits

Department of History and Archaeology and Department of Philology, University of Crete