Timecapsule:
Combining botanical and
pharmaceutical heritage
data from different sources
in time and space
Toine Pieters
Utrecht University // Descartes Centre for the History
and Philosophy of the Sciences
and the Humanities
Project Time Capsule
(Oct. 2013-Oct. 2017)
April 13, 2015
Project Time Capsule
(Oct. 2013-Oct. 2017)
Mission:
the development of a digital data platform for
ethno-pharmacological knowledge (1550-1850), as
a tool for medical historical and ethnobotanical
research and educational purposes
Inspiration
Andy Warhol's largest collecting
project (early '70s until his death
in 1987): 600 cardboard boxes
How to fill the virtual boxes and how
to move them in time and space?
Building an ontology that will facilitate
cross-database queries and
information retrieval
What are the user
demands/needs?
The history of botany =
the history of pharmacy
C. Haris Saslis-Lagoudakis et al., 'Phylogenies
reveal predictive power of traditional medicine
in bioprospecting', Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences of the United States of
America (PNAS) (2012)
Purpose: historical mapping of the
circulation of pharmaceutical knowledge
Dutch commodity chains: trading
food, medicines and poisons
April 13, 2015
Building an ontology that will facilitate
cross-database queries and
information retrieval
How can this be achieved?
Designing an ontology
linking different kinds of data by means of
semantic relationships
An iterative strategy for the co-construction of
ontology technology by users and developers
April 13, 2015
Towards a
national thesaurus
Meertens Inst.
Cultural Heritage Agency
(RCE)
Heritage resources
Dutch
Royal
Library
National
Herbarium
(Naturalis)
Sound and Vision
Institute