A new initiative of the Ancient World Mapping Center (AWMC) called Benthos aims to catalog and map the waters of the ancient Mediterranean basin. This information came from The Ancient World Online blog in their post, “Benthos: Digital Atlas of Ancient Waters beta version.”

The project will incorporate physical landscape data for the ocean floor, coastlines, and ports, as well as data for important rivers, estuaries, and coastal lagoons. It is also possible to incorporate digital models for both ocean current and prevailing wind patterns.

AWMC is introducing a beta version of Benthos: Digital Atlas of Ancient Waters. The project is in its most preliminary stages, but AWMC welcomes feedback from the community.

Bennthos aims to employ accurate historical geography to identify ports and other relevant sites, as well as to seek out archaeological information for the location of ancient shipwrecks.

This will be interesting to follow along, and archiving this indexed data will be helpful to those in the future. With any digital archiving project, it is important to remember the value of a solid taxonomy. How the content is classified impacts the findability of your data. Professionals should look for an experienced builder of solid standards-based taxonomies to associate content for appropriate machine-assisted indexing. Access Innovations can provide solutions that are ANSI compliant.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.