[Library Dean’s Fellow Involved in the Project]

Syriaca.org's research has been supported by the Dean’s Fellowship program of the Jean & Alexander Heard Library at Vanderbilt University. In the Spring of 2016, a Ph.D. student in the Graduate Department of Religion was the lead researcher on a project, “Linked Data from the Medieval Middle East.” The goal of the project was to enhance the digital data of Syriaca.org by exporting it as “Linked Open Data.” This enhancement is designed to breakdown the walls between databases (the so-called “silo effect”) so that Syriaca.org can connect its own findings to multiple databases. The first of these was with Pelagios and its partner, Pleiades. Pelagios is a collaborative effort of over 30 scholarly websites which hold geographic data related to ancient art, archaeology, history, and literature.