LocLinkVis: A Geographic Information Retrieval-Based System for Large-Scale Exploratory Search

In this paper we present LocLinkVis (Locate-Link-Visualize); a system which supports exploratory information access to a document collection based on geo-referencing and visualization. It uses a gazetteer which contains representations of places ranging from countries to buildings, and that is used to recognize toponyms, disambiguate them into places, and to visualize the resulting spatial footprints.Comment: SEM'1

A geo-temporal information extraction service for processing descriptive metadata in digital libraries

In the context of digital map libraries, resources are usually described according to metadata records that define the relevant subject, location, time-span, format and keywords. On what concerns locations and time-spans, metadata records are often incomplete or they provide information in a way that is not machine-understandable (e.g. textual descriptions). This paper presents techniques for extracting geotemporal information from text, using relatively simple text mining methods that leverage on a Web gazetteer service. The idea is to go from human-made geotemporal referencing (i.e. using place and period names in textual expressions) into geo-spatial coordinates and time-spans. A prototype system, implementing the proposed methods, is described in detail. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed approaches

The Family Name as Socio-Cultural Feature and Genetic Metaphor: From Concepts to Methods

A recent workshop entitled The Family Name as Socio-Cultural Feature and Genetic Metaphor: From Concepts to Methods was held in Paris in December 2010, sponsored by the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and by the journal Human Biology. This workshop was intended to foster a debate on questions related to the family names and to compare different multidisciplinary approaches involving geneticists, historians, geographers, sociologists and social anthropologists. This collective paper presents a collection of selected communications

Publication, Testing and Visualization with EFES : A tool for all stages of the EpiDoc XML editing process

EpiDoc is a set of recommendations, schema and other tools for the encoding of ancient texts, especially inscriptions and papyri, in TEI XML, that is now used by upwards of a hundred projects around the world, and large numbers of scholars seek training in EpiDoc encoding every year. The EpiDoc Front-End Services tool (EFES) was designed to fill the important need for a publication solution for researchers and editors who have produced EpiDoc encoded texts but do not have access to digital humanities support or a well-funded IT service to produce a publication for them. This paper will discuss the use of EFES not only for final publication, but as a tool in the editing and publication workflow, by editors of inscriptions, papyri and similar texts including those on coins and seals. The edition visualisations, indexes and search interface produced by EFES are able to serve as part of the validation, correction and research apparatus for the author of an epigraphic corpus, iteratively improving the editions long before final publication. As we will argue, this research process is a key component of epigraphic and papyrological editing practice, and studying these needs will help us to further enhance the effectiveness of EFES as a tool. To this end we also plan to add three major functionalities to the EFES toolbox: (1) date visualisation and filter—building on the existing “date slider,” and inspired by partner projects such as Pelagios and Godot; (2) geographic visualization features, again building on Pelagios code, allowing the display of locations within a corpus or from a specific set of search results in a map; (3) export of information and metadata from the corpus as Linked Open Data, following the recommendations of projects such as the Linked Places format, SNAP, Chronontology and Epigraphy.info, to enable the semantic sharing of data within and beyond the field of classical and historical editions. Finally, we will discuss the kinds of collaboration that will be required to bring about desired enhancements to the EFES toolset, especially in this age of research-focussed, short-term funding. Embedding essential infrastructure work of this kind in research applications for specific research and publication projects will almost certainly need to be part of the solution.Peer reviewe

Placenames analysis in historical texts: tools, risks and side effects

International audienceThis article presents an approach combining linguistic analysis, geographic information retrieval and visualization in order to go from toponym extraction in historical texts to projection on customizable maps. The toolkit is released under an open source license, it features bootstrapping options, geocod-ing and disambiguation algorithms, as well as cartographic processing. The software setting is designed to be adaptable to various historical contexts, it can be extended by further automatically processed or user-curated gazetteers, used directly on texts or plugged-in on a larger processing pipeline. I provide an example of the issues raised by generic extraction and show the benefits of integrated knowledge-based approach, data cleaning and filtering

LAF-Fabric: a data analysis tool for Linguistic Annotation Framework with an application to the Hebrew Bible

The Linguistic Annotation Framework (LAF) provides a general, extensible stand-off markup system for corpora. This paper discusses LAF-Fabric, a new tool to analyse LAF resources in general with an extension to process the Hebrew Bible in particular. We first walk through the history of the Hebrew Bible as text database in decennium-wide steps. Then we describe how LAF-Fabric may serve as an analysis tool for this corpus. Finally, we describe three analytic projects/workflows that benefit from the new LAF representation: 1) the study of linguistic variation: extract cooccurrence data of common nouns between the books of the Bible (Martijn Naaijer); 2) the study of the grammar of Hebrew poetry in the Psalms: extract clause typology (Gino Kalkman); 3) construction of a parser of classical Hebrew by Data Oriented Parsing: generate tree structures from the database (Andreas van Cranenburgh)

06491 Abstracts Collection -- Digital Historical Corpora- Architecture, Annotation, and Retrieval

From 03.12.06 to 08.12.06, the Dagstuhl Seminar 06491 ``Digital Historical Corpora - Architecture, Annotation, and Retrieval\u27\u27 was held in the International Conference and Research Center (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if availabl