A Prosopography as Linked Open Data: Some Implications from DPRR

The Digital Prosopography of the Roman Republic (DPRR) project has created a freely available structured prosopography of people from the Roman Republic. As a part of this work the materials that were produced by the project have been made available as Linked Open Data (LOD): translated into RDF, and served through an RDF Server. This article explains what it means to present the material as Linked Open Data by means of working, interactive examples. DPRR didn't do some of the work which has been conventionally associated with Linked Open Data. However, by considering the two conceptions of the Semantic Web and Linked Open Data as proposed by Tim Berners-Lee one can see how DPRR's RDF Server fits best into the LOD picture, including how it might serve to facilitate new ways to explore its material. The article gives several examples of ways of exploiting DPRR's RDF dataset, and other similarly structured materials, to enable new research approaches.