LGPN and Information Technology

LGPN data - a re-evaluation?

When Peter Fraser established LGPN in 1972 - in a pre-computer age - he had thought long and hard about the need for such a project, the scholarly criteria on which it would be based, and the impact it was likely to make. The subject was not a new one: 150 years of scholarship lay behind his initiative, and he came to it with as full a knowledge as it was possible to have at that time. Nontheless, the work which LGPN was to replace was 100 years old, and the new onomasticon inevitably involved leaps of faith: it was impossible to know how much evidence there would be, and what new insights it would bring.

When, a little over ten years into the project (but nearly ten years into our use of computers) we were confronted by the need to design our first database, we had the opportunity to re-examine our data, with a decade of research behind us and many thousands of research fiches in front of us. Such opportunities are valuable. If the founding principles were sound, no significant gaps will be identified (even if they were, they would be unlikely to be plugged, since research on a grand scale cannot be done again). But, as we found in 1984, the research data may be enhanced by the possibilities, or requirements, of their new electronic format. In 1984, several 'sub-units' of onomastic information acquired their own status in the new database: for example, the orthographically variant form of a name, or a name occurring as part of Roman tria nomina became accessible to research enquiry.

That was 25 years ago. Our present exercise, the transition from relational database to TEI-XML, similarly poses opportunities, and requirements, to re-examine our data, to make sure that we give it the accessibility and the exploitation it deserves. But this time the context is not just our own research data, but the wider world of digital resources. That means that we must align our data with major ontologies and with the technologies of the semantic web.

As a preliminary, though, we need to reach understanding, first with ourselves and then with the colleagues with whom we are working, about what we mean when we use terms which recur in many datasets, to which, inevitably in the digital world, LGPN will be 'linked'.   What do we mean by our record 'place'? what lies behind our date system?

In these pages, we shall post preliminary discussion papers, as they become available.

(to be continued).