Dear colleagues,

I don’t recall seeing this posted on our list, but if I missed it, please forgive the duplication. 

“CLAROS began in 2000 as CLassical Art Research Online Research Services with Europe’s leading research centres for the art of ancient Greece and Rome. Since 1979 these centres, in the universities of Oxford, Cologne, and Paris, have been creating scholarly databases about the art of classical antiquity. Well studied, highly classified, and appreciated by a global community, they have provided an ideal foundation.”

The home page of the CLAROS project is http://explore.clarosnet.org/XDB/ASP/clarosHome/index.html

> From <http://bit.ly/l45nq0>:
> ====================
>
> AWOL - The Ancient World Online
>
> Formal Launch of CLAROS
> Posted: 19 May 2011 06:37 AM PDT
>
> CLAROS launched its first public service on May 17th with a web-based
> explorer interface, and a data-oriented service.
>
> Based at the e-Research Centre in Oxford, CLAROS is an international
> research collaboration to enable simultaneous searching of major
> collections of digital material about archaeology and art in
> university research institutes and museums. It contains material from
> a wide range of data partners, including the Beazley Archive, various
> digital archives in the Ashmolean Museum, the Arachne archive, the
> Lexicon of Greek Personal Names, and the Lexicon Iconographicum
> Mythologiae Classicae, recording over 2 million objects, places,
> photographs, and people.
>
> CLAROS is a resource discovery service, and its job is to provide
> cacheing, indexing, querying and visualization services. The working
> practice is one of federation. CLAROS ingests a catalogue of records
> from each data partner and amalgamates it into a single entity, but
> for more detailed information about a hit we return to the original
> web site of the partner. CLAROS data is modelled using RDF against the
> CIDOC CRM ontology, and can be accessed using an open SPARQL endpoint,
> as well as the powerful web site.
>
> CLAROS is work in progress, with more data partners to come, and large
> amounts of work to be done on both internal linking, and linking to
> the wider semantic web. The first fruit of this will be completion of
> work to join up the places inside CLAROS with those in geonames and
> Pleiades.
>