Rosette @ I&E Rosette @ I&E 20062006

Oxford – August 8-9, 2006

A Dream for HarmonyIn Computerized

Egyptology

Vincent Euverte, delegated by the Rosette Team

The Rosette ProjectIt started from a dream ... let’s imagine ...

– You are in Karnak temple facing a carved wall,– walking by the British Museum or Le Louvre,– in-depth in a book on Ancient Egypt,– facing a Web-page plenty of hieroglyphs, – ...

Either you are among the rare people familiar with these signs, ... or struggling to understand what the hell it means ... or you are somewhere in between !

To master hieroglyphs, there are many cumbersome tasks that can be learned with years of practice ... But some of them can also be automated and assisted by technology.

Rosette certainly does not pretend to replace the learning values, but to facilitate it by pulling-out the boring parts, allowing the user to concentrate on other tasks such as interpretation.

How did Rosette born ?

After my third trip to Egypt, I decided to learn hieroglyphs on my own ...

Reading books, practicising exercises, surfing the Web ... in short, suffering !

After 2 months, I had developed few small tools on my PC to help me ... but ... still struggling !

I started to navigate on different fora about egyptology, and posted my dream.

Receiving immediate support, a website and a forum were created in two days

Rosette was born, on August 17th, 2004

2-years Rosette Story

An initial development in MS-Access (3Q04) ...

... an attempt to go to the Wiki concept (4Q04) ...

... migrating to PHP / MySQL (1H05) ...

After one year, the first product was on line

A computer assistance to identify and read hieroglyphic texts

Then started one year of shadow work ...

At last, Rosette is going to publish V2.0

Who is Rosette ?

A Dream Team you never thought of !

–multi-discipline–of all origins and ages–worldwide spread

–and all enthusiastic and committed

I have the honour to present yousome of the Rosette Team players

Who creates Rosette ?

The Rosette’s modules

The Rosette’s modules

OCR ... still a dream ... but believable !Graphic functions ...

– a quality home-made font already available– fully scalable under Unicode standard

Hieroglyph Editor– MdC compliant, including transliteration input– interacting with the hieroglyph catalogue, the dictionary,

and the lexical and syntactic analyzers– supporting several scalable fonts

Lexical Analyzer– founded on a growing multi-language dictionary– with lexical type search facilities

Syntax Engine : – a neuronal network to help investigating the maze of the

ancient egyptian grammar.

Text Corpus– with a storage capacity of thousands of texts– including MdC, transliteration, multi-language translations,

source references, ... and interaction with the above

Hieroglyphs for PCs ?

In 1842, E. de Rougé launched the first set of hieroglyphic characters for printing, soon followed by R. Lepsius (Theinhardt font)

... And not so many evolutions until computers entered in the game ! A great opportunity to use scalable fonts for a better drawing.

When Rosette began with the GlyphBasic set, the CCER denied us the rights to use it.

Fortunately, Saqqara Technology gave us the permission to use InScribe for our first version.

All separate font sets were merged in one Unicode TTF file, in line with the EGPZ proposal.

An home made font

We finally decided to develop our own font:

A high precision drawing : Bernard captures original pictures from JF Champollion, stellaes, or other high quality documents

Our Font Creator is using simple techniques to generate scalable characters from original documents.

A question of homogeneity : the variety of sources generates inconsistency across the font. We plan to create a parallel collection to handle long texts.

Image capture

Rosette-Mury fontEither from JF Champollion’s drawings

Or from beautiful original documents

Compared to others

Rosette CatalogEvery hieroglyph is documented

– While most are easily recognizable, some require a bit of description

– Associated with every Gardiner code : • Unicode value and its Ascii code in GlyphBasic fonts,• transliteration, • description, meaning, and comments,• source references

– Wherever a hieroglyph is displayed in Rosette, a simple click pops-up the catalog window with french and english details, including a comparison of the Rosette-Mury and the Inscribe characters

demonstration

Rosette DictionaryA search tool in itself, and to support text analysis

– It includes the Gardiner sequence, transliteration, syntactic type, multi-language translations, comments (e.g. for variants, period, ...), and source references

– Search tools are available by Gardiner sequence, keywords, transliteration, and syntactic type, including joker characters

– So far, 2300 words are captured (30% translated in english). Capture is underway for Faulkner, Gardiner, Menu, Grandet & Mathieu, ... With a target of 40,000.

Potential improvements:– Multi-criteria searches– Ordering functionality (several options)– Printing facilities– Offering visitors the ability to propose edits/additions– « Referent rating »

demonstration

Text CorpusAnother Rosette’s goal is to collate every rights-free text from any period in a common repository.To be trustable, each text must be enriched by :

– An image of the source document– The MdC encoding of the entire text– Its transliteration– Its translation(s), multi-language, with possible variants– Bibliographic references– Period / date / geography / support type

By being homogenously stored, all these texts can be combined for cross-text searches, such as

– lexicographic analysis, – syntactic structures, – frequency of a hieroglyph over periods, – ...

Text EditorSimilar to many softwares, free on the Web

– compliant with the MdC (limited options)

– accepting most transliteration characters

– assisted by picklists, Catalog, and Dictionary

– immediate lexical and syntactic analyses

– printing functionalities

Still a lot of improvements planned

– a complete MdC compliance

– multiple lines handling

– interface with the Text Corpus

– PDF and/or HTML export

– ... demonstration

Lexical analyzerA text, a dictionary and a series of syntactic types

– It looks simple with such a definition ... however– A basic search without any constraint provides

thousands of results ... Not really helpful !– To cover inversion of characters, and partial

matching of hieroglyph series, a rating calculation is provided.

– Also preliminary filters are set-up by default, but can be modified by the visitor (word length, type, matching rate, ...).

What is next ?– review the syntactic types ... Needs validation– improve the priority order of syntactic types– add the « referrent » rating criteria– ...

Syntax EngineA fuzzy logic for a complex grammar

– Many trials, some very successful, attempt to master the grammatical side of languages.

– Ancient Egyptian adds to the complexity by • the number of signs encountered

• a bi-dimensionnal / multi-direction / multi-variant... writting

• the freedom left to the scribe to choose between sign variants and positionning (even inverting signs !)

• through 3 millenia of evolution but steady writting

• ...

– Is it possible to adapt an existing tool ? ... No !– Is it possible to create a dedicated one ? ... Yes !

• defining grammatical rules as input/treatment/outpout

• allocating « ratings » to measure the matching pertinence

• using mathematical techniques : neuronal networks

• ... then the dream comes to reality ... It works !

– Is it possible to build on other’s experience ? ... Yes !demonstration

Final productRosette already achieved part of its goals ... but ...... as you have seen, we want more ... what’s next ?

... Rosette is a «million-years project» ... – Develop the improvements already identified,

and with our current ressources, it will take some time !

– Pending the outcomes of this meeting, we may have to revisit some of our « givens ».

– Under the blessing of the Egyptology Community, we may motivate more contribtuors.

– Text and dictionary collection essentially depends on visitor’s good will and faith.

– The « referent » concept requires some consensus before it may be recognized and accepted.

– Our goal is to address everyone attracted in hieroglyphs, from beginner to specialist ... We only reached a few so far !

– Even further : one over a thousand looks at hieroglyphs ... How to attract the other 999 ?

Is not the Ancient Egyptian civilisation worth it ?

Rosette learningsAfter two years efforts, and one year online

– Technology can really assist the egyptologist in many ways, regardless of his/her skills ... but ...

– Given the Ancient Egyptian complexity, multiple choices are frequent.

The user must make choices at many steps.

– The full translation can not be automated. Final interpretation remains with the human.

– So many standards, languages, navigators,... on the Web. We opted for XHTML 1.0 ... and trust me, it is not an easy commitment !

– From a project management standpoint, a team of benevolents is more complex and sensitive than a professionnal one.

– Time availability always an issue ... ... Skills are sometimes ...

... Money is not !

Roads for the future

What should be a Universal Egyptology Tool ?

– Rosette is certainly not the universal solution ... but it may open the door to it

– The need for a common repository has been expressed in many occasions, on many media

– Rosette just proposes a format and an infrastructure which can start to collect the data

– At any point in time, should an « official and central » repository comes to life, all Rosette assets can be converted and transferred, readily available under GNU-GPL !

– A Wiki-like approach will allow to agregate data from an giant knowledge reservoir, worldwide.

Roads for the future

Few criteria we recommend :

–A hieroglyph encoding universally normalized

–The MdC requires some enhancements, precisions, and complements

–A standard for transliteration display (e.g. «i» versus «j»)

–Some definitions on datation/periods, with common coding

–A commonly accepted list of references & sources

–A « referee concept », providing an official rating on the translation quality

–and of course, a free distribution on the Webwhich does not exclude copyrights under GPL

They did not know it was impossible... so they did it ! (Mark Twain)