An Ontological View of Canonical Citations

Matteo Romanello1 Michele Pasin1

1Department of Digital HumanitiesKing’s College London

Digital Humanities conference 2011Stanford, California

21 June 2011

Romanello, Pasin (DDH) HuCit DH2011 1 / 14

Project Context

PhD at the DDH, KCLdiscussion started during an internal Knowledge RepresentationseminarHuCit: ontology for the citations in the Humanitiespart of a domain ontology for Classicsapplication: knowledge base to support the automatic extraction ofcitations from text

Romanello, Pasin (DDH) HuCit DH2011 2 / 14

Related Work

Ontology EngineeringCiTO, Citation Typing OntologySWAN Ecosystem, esp. Scientific Discourse OntologyOpenCyc

Canonical CitationsCanonical Text Services (CTS), Harvard Univ.Classical Works Knowledge Base (CWKB), Cornell Univ.

Romanello, Pasin (DDH) HuCit DH2011 3 / 14

Canonical Citations

Motivation

precision of references to texts

persistency of citations

interoperability of citations across editions

Characteristics

are not tight to a specific edition of a text (loosely coupled)

canonical: result of an agreement within a specific community of practice

Examples

Hom. Il. 1.1

Athen. Deipn, X 412a

Arist. Poetics 1451a35-b6

Romanello, Pasin (DDH) HuCit DH2011 4 / 14

Citing Aristotle

Bekker numbersI derived from his edition (1831-1870) of Aristotle’s worksI used by all scholarly editions

citation structure:I 1451a35I page / column / lineI / [0-9]{4}[a-z]{1}[0-9]+ /

alternative citation structure:I eg: VIII 4 - IX 3I medieval systemI book / chapter / sentence

Similar systems:I Stephanus page (Plutarch)I Casaubon page (Athenaeus)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bekker_numbers

Romanello, Pasin (DDH) HuCit DH2011 5 / 14

Citations in a print environment

Butcher’s edition (1922) p. 34 and Bekker’s edition (1831) p. 184

Romanello, Pasin (DDH) HuCit DH2011 6 / 14

FRBR in a nutshell

FRBR: Functional Requirements for Bibliographic RecordsWork: the abstract content of a Work (substance is concepts)Expression: the text of a Work (substance is signs)Manifestation: the physical carrier of an Expression

ExampleWork: The abstract content of Homer’s IliadExpression: The text of Iliad in the Italian translation by the poetVincenzo Monti (XIX century)Manifestation: A copy of V. Monti, Iliad, Milano : Mondadori, 1995[isbn: 8804394846]

Romanello, Pasin (DDH) HuCit DH2011 7 / 14

HuCit’s Overview

Romanello, Pasin (DDH) HuCit DH2011 8 / 14

A Canonical Citation (macro level)

Romanello, Pasin (DDH) HuCit DH2011 9 / 14

Citation Styles

Romanello, Pasin (DDH) HuCit DH2011 10 / 14

Canonical Citation as resolvable pointer

Romanello, Pasin (DDH) HuCit DH2011 11 / 14

Citation Scheme and Textual Structure

Romanello, Pasin (DDH) HuCit DH2011 12 / 14

Textual Structure and Expressions

Romanello, Pasin (DDH) HuCit DH2011 13 / 14

Wrap up

Contributiona conceptual model of how canonical citations worka more abstract / application-independent model to encodesemantics of canon. citationsinteroperability with other standards/protocols for canonicalcitations (CTS, CWKB)small ontology but mapped to other ontologies (CIDOC-CRM andFRBRoo)

Ontology populationcitations extracted from texts (JSTOR, APh)textual structures to be extracted from TEI encoded texts(Perseus)reasoning over the KB to support automatic extraction

Romanello, Pasin (DDH) HuCit DH2011 14 / 14