Dear Dominik,
We discussed the issues privately a year ago and we took many of your extremely useful suggestions on board.
As highlighted in the articles, the triplestore data of the JP will be made available free to use by anyone once the download functions and webpage are installed. I wish this was the case all around especially in India where Jaina electronic datasets are as difficult to access as the Jaisalmer bhandar.
The most interesting answer I received so far to the standard question as to the long term viability of databases (for the JP guaranteed by Sheffield DHI) was the one of GabrieI Bodard at Senate House. I think he is right in saying that the only procedure that preserved texts in the past and will preserve electronic data over time is copying. No super database or web-portal will ever emerge and be able to survive over time (maybe apart from the internet itself). Building in options for linking purpose built datasets at the point of development therefore seems to be the way to go.
The data mining software Gabriel developed is limited to the standard categories of name, date, place etc. 'Stage two' prosopographies' however require uniform data and often highly differentiated taxononomies for specific purposes and require a great deal of case specific analysis.
Given permissions (!) it may be possible relatively easily to produce a dataset of datasets through copying. But the emerging datasets will not be uniform and hence require massive work to be useful for stage two prosopographies. I can presently not see how this can be handled without hands on editorship. Since eternal editor roles are inconceivable some kind of standard will have to emerge.
Solving the conundrum of finding a standard for coding Indian family names for library catalogues proved tricky and has been abandoned as far as I can see. In the articles I laid out the practical and theoretical issues we faced as a memento of self-reflection but also in view of informing (potential) collaborators on this specific project. I found Keats-Rohan's book by far the most useful source for practical research with such tools. She did not touch upon South Asian materials though.
On the addition problem how to operationalise patronage I didn't find much useful information but I may have missed something. TEI has no useful categories. Off the shelf does not always work for particular research questions as well.
Clearly at least in South Asian Studies most work still lies ahead. We need datasets comparable to the projects on the Roman materials of Mommsen etc. (which are still not digitally available, certainly not in state two prosopographical format). Pandit is fabulous but did not provide the tools for instigating the research questions informing the JP project. Otherwise I would have indeed simply requested Yigal to permit putting data in and computing them as suggested by you. I am not aware of a sociologically oriented stage-two prosopography in South Asian studies at present and cannot be sure whether in a limited way the JP will succeed realising this aim. It also is a pilot study. But its data can be copied ad we learn quite a lot about the structure of the Jaina data in the process of analysis.
Sigh...
Peter