Towards a linked open data edition of Sumerian corpora

Linguistic Linked Open Data (LLOD) is a flourishing line of research in the language resource community, so far mostly adopted for selected aspects of linguistics, natural language processing and the semantic web, as well as for practical applications in localization and lexicography. Yet, computational philology seems to be somewhat decoupled from the recent progress in this area: even though LOD as a concept is gaining significant popularity in Digital Humanities, existing LLOD standards and vocabularies are not widely used in this community, and philological resources are underrepresented in the LLOD cloud diagram (http://linguistic-lod.org/llod-cloud). In this paper, we present an application of Linguistic Linked Open Data in Assyriology. We describe the LLOD edition of a linguistically annotated corpus of Sumerian, as well as its linking with lexical resources, repositories of annotation terminology, and the museum collections in which the artifacts bearing these texts are kept. The chosen corpus is the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Royal Inscriptions, a well curated and linguistically annotated archive of Sumerian text, in preparation for the creating and linking of other corpora of cuneiform texts, such as the corpus of Ur III administrative and legal Sumerian texts, as part of the Machine Translation and Automated Analysis of Cuneiform Languages project (https://cdli-gh.github.io/mtaac/)