THE PTOLEMY PROJECT
When you start digging into the past, proverbially and physically, we begin to see gaps everywhere, what we know is scattered, nothing is available to link it all together. Even with AI and the internets, there is a vast amount of Books and artifacts and knowledge not accessible to Humanity.
History is so important, much more than most realise, for it is the story of civilisation, of our ancestors, of how we got here and why it is the way it is.
So i am starting a Project, called the Ptolemy Project. Outlined in the memo linked.
It is an effort to link all the data, all the artifacts, all the ancient constructions, all the histories under one umbrella, searchable by time and location with a dedicated AI model trained on the data.
Yes it is a huge project, a Global project, but it must start somewhere!
https://moralsmark.com/memo-ptolemy-project
Background added here, not part of the post as published.
The memo sets out eight record types, each captured and graded separately and harvested into one corpus, rendered as a map with a time control: texts, artefacts, constructions, cities, territory, excavations, battles and translation. Nothing is centralised except the catalogue; physical custody is unaffected.
One rule sits at the front of it: reproductions of public-domain works — scans, photographs, 3D models, transcriptions, translations — are released into the public domain. No non-commercial clause, no attribution requirement.
Some of the figures in it: around half a million papyrus fragments excavated at one Egyptian site from 1896, of which roughly five thousand are published; some 500,000 cuneiform tablets excavated, about nine in ten never published; one British Library programme has digitised over sixteen million images and does not release the high-resolution files; the Dunhuang manuscripts are held in five countries, and the images were reunited while nothing moved.