[Works, Documents, Texts and Related Resources] | [Ontologies] for everyoneDigital Humanities 2010London, King’s College, 9th July 2010

Federico Meschini and Peter Robinson

To answer this question you have to:

A very simple questionFind me all the manuscripts which contain the first line of the Canterbury Tales

• Identify objects• Provide information about the objects• Package the objects in appropriate form

That simple?

Interoperabilty“the ability of two or more systems or components to exchange information and to use the information that has been exchanged”IEEE

Interoperabilty&Levels

Stefan Gradmann, INTEROPERABILITY. A key concept for large scale, persistent digitallibraries. (briefing paper) <www.digitalpreservationeurope.eu/publications/briefs/interoperability.pdf>

What’s in a Word Philosophical origin, then adopted by LIS&CS domain- What is reality [existence]?- What is the identity of an object [properties and relationships] ?

From this to the [computable] “specification of a conceptualization”

From this to Description Logic, First Order Logic rules and inferences, Semantic Web [RDF/S/OWL, Triplestore, Linked Data, SPARQL], etc.

Ontology is a four-letter word

“In some conferences I have been asked of not using the ‘O‘ word”James HendlerOverexpectations about the Semantic Web to solve all the Web [World] problemsRelationships between XML, RDF and Relational Database

Textual Criticism

“There is an infinite set of facts related to the work being edited. […] Any edition records [models] a selection from the observable and the recoverable portions of this infinite set of facts”C. M. Sperberg-McQueen - How to teach your edition how to swim

FRBR

CIDOC-CRM

FRBRoo

DL&OAI

OAI-Object Reuse and Exchange: high-level aggregation and description of scholarly (scientific) digital items

- Nines [http://www.nines.org/]- Discovery [http://www.discovery-project.eu/]- Henry III Fine Rolls [http://www.finerollshenry3.org.uk/]- Perseus [http://www.perseus.tufts.edu]

- [...]- TEI Ontologies SIG [

http://wiki.tei-c.org/index.php/SIG:Ontologies]

SemanticDH

“We have to (wisely) use Ontologies, we don’t have to (fully&blindly) believe in them”Øyvind Eide via Dino Buzzetti

To conclude...

Back to our simple questionFind me all the manuscripts which contain the first line of the Canterbury Tales

Documents

Works Text

s

Six basic classes

document

work

text

documentPart

workPart

textPart

a manuscript: Hengwrt

the Canterbury Tales

the text of the Canterbury Tales in the Hengwrt manuscript

Relationships …some triples

the document Hengwrt isContainerOf the text of the CT in the Hengwrt MS

the workPart the first line of the CT isPartOfthe work the CT

the workPart the first line of the CT hasInstancethe textPart the first line of the CT in Hengwrt

the transcript at http://mytranscript/Hg/CT/1 isTranscriptOfthe textPart the first line of the CT in Hengwrt

Things we like

• We can deal with documents that just contain text (not works)

• We can link together digital things (eg. transcripts) with non-digital things (eg. manuscripts)

• We just have to describe six things: use FOAF, sameAs, FRBR, CIDOC for everything else

Some implications

• An interface: who needs them?

• Expose all metadata, all relationships

• Suddenly, sustainability is easier

Where we are heading

• Break the Alexandria consensus

• Textual communities, based on a different model of partnership between scholars and readers

Federico Meschini • De Montfort University/ Loyola University ChicagoPeter Robinson • University of Birmingham/ University of Saskatchewan

http://www.vmr.bham.ac.uk/dwt