(1) Overview
Repository location
The dataset is openly available via the repository DaSCH Service Platform (DSP) of the Swiss National Data and Service Center for the Humanities (DaSCH) at the following Archival Resource Key (ARK): https://ark.dasch.swiss/ark:/72163/1/080E.
Context
This data is based on the material collected at the main editiorial office in Basel under the patronage of UNESCO during the preparation of eight double volumes and one supplementary volume of the Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae (LIMC), as well as eight volumes of the Thesaurus Cultus et Rituum Antiquorum (ThesCRA). The physical archive is now located in the basement of the Department of Ancient Civilizations at the University of Basel.
LIMC is an encyclopaedia and standard work about representations of classical mythology – it collects what is known about Greek, Etruscan and Roman mythology (Foundation for the Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae, 1981–1997, 2009). ThesCRA is a reference work on the religious cults and rites of antiquity (Foundation for the Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae, 2004–2012).
(2) Method
Steps
Digital LIMC has its origin in the basic information – the type of object, LIMC/ThesCRA article, LIMC/ThesCRA article number, storage location, inventory number – collected for each representation of classical mythology in a self-developed relational database. This database was originally used to create the indices for the printed books. From 2005 onward, about 40,000 collected black-and-white photographs, stored in the physical archive in Basel, were digitised. In 2014, the data was exported and it was decided to provide the data in linked open data form in the future. Thanks to financial support by several funders during the years 2015 to 2019, it was possible to enrich the data considerably: short keyword-like descriptions were added for about 60% of all representations, as well as other context information such as category, material, dating, or provenance information, links to other online resources such as online museum databases or the Beazley Archive Pottery Database (Classical Art Research Centre, 2003–2025). Furthermore, mythological figures were tagged. The data was stored in the software framework SALSAH (https://dhlab-basel.github.io/Salsah/; last accessed: 24 November 2025), developed by the Digital Humanities Lab of the University of Basel. SALSAH was suitable for storing, sharing and working on data. Since 2016, Digital LIMC has been available online with persistent ARK identifiers for each of the more than 300,000 individual resources. Since SALSAH became technically obsolete, the data (Digital LIMC, 2021) was migrated to the successor, the DaSCH Service Platform (DSP), developed by the Swiss National Data and Service Center for the Humanities (DaSCH, https://github.com/dasch-swiss; last accessed: 24 November 2025). The migration process, which was successfully completed in late 2024, was used to improve the data model, to map it to reference ontologies, and to further enrich the data with norm data such as Getty Vocabularies (The Getty Research Institute, n.d.), GeoNames (GeoNames, n.d.), Pleiades (Ancient World Mapping Center and Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, n.d.), and links to several other archaeological databases such as Manto (Manto, n.d.) or Ubi Erat Lupa (Ubi Erat Lupa, n.d.), or to more general knowledge bases such as Wikidata (Wikidata, n.d.). Links to objects in other databases have been obtained by automated matching of storage location and inventory numbers. For this task, python scripts had been written. The dataset currently consists of almost 3,000 mythological and historical figures on ca. 56,000 objects, 40,500 images, and 21,633,663 Resource Description Framework (RDF) triples. Currently, about 60% of the data contain at least a short description of the representation in addition to the basic information. In DSP, a living archive, the data can be continuously updated. Digital LIMC data is accessible for people via a web application and for machines via an Application Programming Interface (API). A documentation of the data model (Gautschy, 2024) as well as instructions for searches via the Interface and the API (Gautschy, 2025a; 2025b) are provided as part of the data. In 2025, Digital LIMC has received its own Wikidata property – Digital LIMC ID P13094 (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P13094; last accessed: 24 November 2025) – and up to now more than 1,650 mythological figures, archaeological sites, modern places and cultural institutions have been interlinked.
Quality control
The printed LIMC volumes are the standard work on representations of Greek, Etruscan and Roman mythological figures, and Digital LIMC is its digital counterpart. It serves as a hub for other archaeological and philological projects and online resources for disambiguation. The brief descriptions of each representation are based on the articles in the printed books. Controlled vocabularies have been used for several properties such as category, material or object. Links to external resources that were obtained by automated matching have been manually reviewed.
(3) Dataset Description
Repository name
DaSCH Service Platform (DSP)
Object name
Digital Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae (Digital LIMC)
Format names and versions
TIFF, JPEG, JPG, JPEG2000, PDF, JSON-LD, CSV
Digital LIMC is a living archive (database) which is internally based on RDF. The data can be accessed and downloaded via the web application of the repository or retrieved in JSON-LD format via the API.
Creation dates
2014-06-02 to present (still ongoing)
Dataset creators
Rita Gautschy – primary data curator and compiler since 2015, University of Basel
Enrico Regazzoni – data curator 2017–2019, University of Basel
Cheyenne Peverelli – data curator 2016–2017, University of Basel
Bruno Magri – primary data curator and compiler until 2015, University of Basel
Language
English, German, French, Italian
License
Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
Publication date
2021-09-02
(4) Reuse Potential
Digital LIMC is already used for disambiguation purposes by other archaeological and philological projects and several further online resources. The Digital LIMC Wikidata property will likely foster additional such use of the data. Furthermore, by interlinking online resources of various kinds, an increasingly large network of archaeological and philological resources is created, which contributes to the democratisation of knowledge. The printed LIMC volumes are expensive and may not be affordable for small cultural institutions or higher education institutions in less developed countries, while to access Digital LIMC data an internet connection is all that is needed. The data is available openly, and no login is required. The dataset can be and is used in different universities for teaching purposes. Availability of the data via the API allows for their use for aggregation purposes. The online availability of LIMC with links to other resources is also relevant for making collections available as explorable data, thereby promoting statistical and quantitative insights into domain data that the fields of digital and computational humanities can provide.
At this point in time, the original LIMC and ThesCRA articles cannot be made available on the platform for copyright reasons. Two further limitations have to be mentioned: firstly, only 81% of all digitised images can be shown and are accessible openly, as for the remaining 19% we lack the respective consent of the owning institutions to show them openly. Secondly, Digital LIMC doesn’t own the copyright of the images. In fact, if not stated otherwise, the indicated copyright owners have to be contacted for permission to use the images in publications. Overall, although 81% of the digitised images from the physical LIMC archive in Basel can be viewed openly, 100% of the accompanying metadata are available.
Acknowledgements
For more than 40 years (1973–2014), hundreds of authors from more than 40 countries around the world were engaged in contributing articles to the two printed multivolume publication series Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae (1981–1999, 2009) and Thesaurus Cultus et Rituum Antiquorum (2004–2006, 2011–2012, 2014). Their work is the base of Digital LIMC.
Competing Interests
The author has no competing interests to declare.
Author Contributions
Rita Gautschy – data curation, funding acquisition, project administration, visualization, writing – original draft