Pleiades Wins an Award and Gets an Upgrade

Here at Jazkarta we’ve been working with the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) for the past year on a project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities to upgrade and improve Pleiades, a gazetteer of ancient places that is free and open to the public. Thus it was very gratifying to learn that Pleiades is the 2017 recipient of the Archaeological Institute of America’s Award for Outstanding Work in Digital Archaeology. Congratulations to the Pleiades team, headed by ISAW’s Tom Elliott!

Pleiades is the most comprehensive geospatial dataset for antiquity available today, giving scholars, students, and enthusiasts the ability to use, create, and share geographic information about the ancient world. It was developed between 2006 and 2008 on version 3 of the open source Plone content management system. Pleiades allows logged in users to define geographic locations and associate them with ancient places, names and scholarly references. The system remained in place from 2008 to 2016 without significant upgrades to the core Plone stack, despite the addition of a number of custom features. Over that time, over 35,000 places were added to the system – and performance degraded significantly as the content expanded.

Our most important NEH deliverable was improving site performance, which we accomplished through an upgrade from Plone 3 to Plone 4.3 and the elimination of performance bottlenecks identified with the help of New Relic monitoring. As of last September we had reduced the average page load time from 8.48 seconds before the upgrade to 2.1 seconds after. This 400% speed-up is even more impressive than it sounds because bots (search engine indexers and third ­party data users) were severely restricted during the pre-­upgrade measurements, and all restrictions were lifted after the upgrade.

Performance improvement was just the start. Here are some of the other changes we’ve made to the site, which you can read more about in the August NEH performance report.

• Process improvements that streamline content creation, review, and publication
• UI improvements that facilitate the use of Pleiades data
• Improved citation and bibliography management through integration with the Zotero bibliography management system
• Enhanced Linked Open Data capabilities
• Comprehensive daily exports
• Bulk imports of Pleiades content

Because of Jazkarta’s high level of expertise in Plone and related technologies, we were able to deliver the Plone upgrade and related performance improvements 6 months ahead of schedule. This left more time for feature improvements than were originally envisioned. As Tom Elliott put it, “our investment in Jazkarta is paying dividends.”