HARE: History and Humanities Aggregated Resource Environment

MOTIVATION PROCEEDS FROM ACTION

There are any number of social relationships that are not simple binary
relationships like mother/son, or lord/vassal. They are well known in modern
society, but my aim is to model such relationships as they appear in medieval
historical records. Among such relations are these:

compadrazgo
co-parenthood
godparenthood
fosterage
milk-brotherhood
paréage
wardship
hostageship
ecclesiastical nephew
surety generally


For the purposes of this exercise. I have data concerning a complex hostage
exchange. Hostageship is a ternary relationship and this pattern characterizes a
number of other relationships as well, notably wardship.

The aim is to explore the ways in which such relationships can be modeled,
stored, and visualized.

Some of the desiderata for the final result:

	• It must be possible to annotate the relation with:
		- bibliographical information: relations don't exist apart from the
			sources they are attested in
		- temporal data: relations hold only within a given span of time
		- geographical data: relations hold within geographical contexts
	
	• It must be possible to get a graphical visualization of the relation or
some small graph of such relations
		
	• It should be possible to discover data (via web api, especially dbpedia
and freebase) associated with any element of the relation and add it to the
graph.
	
	• It should be possible to define and output in a useful format the schema
used to model the relation so that it can be shared with others with similar
data. This will probably take the form of an RDF/OWL ontology or an SQL Entity
Relationship Diagram.

A pretty goddam near random list of stuff that might be useful:

rdflib 
: for manipulating and querying RDF triples

SuRF
: SuRF is an Object RDF Mapper (ORM), similar in concept to Object Relational
Mappers like SQLAlchemy.

NetworkX
: a Python package for the creation, manipulation, and study of the structure,
dynamics, and functions of complex networks

visualization
	javaScript/HTML5 canvas
	pydot for bubbles and arrows vsualization

storage
	SQL
	: sqlite for ease of use.
	4store
	: scalable RDF storage.
	neo4j
	: open source nosql graph database
	
	
What I'm looking for, essentially, is an ontology for the domain of medieval
British historical records that can describe the kind of social relationships
refered to therein, a programmatic framework in which that data can be queried
manipulated and shared, and some kind of visualization engine that can generate
node and edge graphics that can usefully be browsed


# log:
succeeded in generating a truncated form of the target visualization using pydot see rdflib_dot_testingII.py

succeeded in installing networkx and used it in conjunction with pydot to generate a version of the same thing:

nx graph from a dot file:
>>> g = nx.read_dot('/Users/jjc/Desktop/tempdot_fromdot')

generate pydot from nx graph:
>>> g_pydot = nx.to_pydot(g)

then write to svg:
>>> g_pydot.write_svg('~/Desktop/temp3.svg')

Now working on digging the data out of rdflib and generating some native python data structures to experiment with (see: rdflib2nativepy.py). It's becoming clear to me that rdf is not a data format anyone wants to play with natively. It makes better sense to work with other graph data structures and output rdf if needed