Berkeley Prosopography Services
Project archive site
About the project
Berkeley Prosopography Services (BPS) was a project to explore and develop a prototype application to build prosopographical models that support research. The prototype focused on a corpus of cuneiform tablets transcribed into Babylonian.
BPS was originally created at the University of California, Berkeley as a collaboration between the University’s IST/Data Services group (and later the Research IT group) and the Near Eastern Studies Department (now the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures).
BPS was an open-source project created under the Apache 2.0 license. The project source code is available on github.
Project Architecture and Gallery
A glimpse back at Berkeley Prosopography Services in action.
The project was implemented as a web application using PHP and MySQL, following user-centered-design principles. Users could register for a basic account, with read-only access or to browse a little, just login in as “Reader”.
Home page
Users could register for a basic account, with read-only access or to browse a little, just login in as “Reader”.
Managing Corpora
Users could import corpora as TEI (XML) files, manage and explore these corpora.
Corpus Management
Users could browse existing corpora in the system, and see basic metadata about each corpus. Users with appropriate roles could add, reload, or delete corpora.
Corpus Listing
This page showed the set of documents in the corpus, and provided navigation to the details for each.
Corpus Document Details
This showed all of the instances of names in the document. Each was represented as an NRAD, which captures a Name in a Role in an Activity in a Document.