Gnome on the range: finding the hypertextual narratives in ancient wisdom texts

In this paper we present the Sharing Ancient WisdomS (SAWS) project. Working with wisdom texts, or gnomologia, the project aims to produce an enhanced digital scholarly edition of the collected manuscripts which both makes the Greek, Arabic and Spanish texts available and demonstrates the hypertexual nature of these texts. By positioning the texts as collections of sayings, of which a given manuscript only shows one narrative path, we demonstrate how a hypertextual approach allows us to explore alternate narrative paths within and across the texts and support researchers as they study the context, significance and transmission of the wisdoms within these works

Web Based Semantic Communities – Who, How and Why We Might Want Them in the First Place

This paper describes an investigation undertaken as part of the FicNet Human-Computer Interaction project into the online amateur fiction community. By working with the community to determine current practices and areas of concern we consider how future technologies such as the semantic web might be used to design applications to support the community. As a first step in this process we gathered opinions both from members of the community and from those outside the community who had come into contact with it. Taking this information we consider the community as it is and what it might become

Freedom and Restraint: Tags, Vocabularies and Ontologies

The benefit of metadata is widely recognized. However, the nature of that information and the method of production remains a topic of some debate. This division is most noticeable between those who believe in ’free tagging’, and those who prefer the more formal construction of an ontology to define both the vocabulary of the domain and the relationships between the concepts within it. Looking at the community surrounding online amateur authors and the descriptive metadata they have developed over the last thirty years we consider what we can learn from a mature but amateur tagging community. This paper considers how these two systems might be used together to add the easy usability of free tagging to ontology descriptions and the conceptual richness of ontologies to free tags

Bringing Communities to the Semantic Web and the Semantic Web to Communities

In this paper we consider the types of community networks that are most often codified within the Semantic Web. We propose the recognition of a new structure which fulfils the definition of community used outside the SemanticWeb. We argue that the properties inherent in a community allow additional processing to be done with the described relationships existing between entities within the community network. Taking an existing online community as a case study we describe the ontologies and applications that we developed to support this community in the Semantic Web environment and discuss what lessons can be learnt from this exercise and applied in more general settings

Exploring manuscripts: sharing ancient wisdoms across the semantic web

Recent work in digital humanities has seen researchers in-creasingly producing online editions of texts and manuscripts, particularly in adoption of the TEI XML format for online publishing. The benefits of semantic web techniques are un-derexplored in such research, however, with a lack of sharing and communication of research information. The Sharing Ancient Wisdoms (SAWS) project applies linked data prac-tices to enhance and expand on what is possible with these digital text editions. Focussing on Greek and Arabic col-lections of ancient wise sayings, which are often related to each other, we use RDF to annotate and extract seman-tic information from the TEI documents as RDF triples. This allows researchers to explore the conceptual networks that arise from these interconnected sayings. The SAWS project advocates a semantic-web-based methodology, en-hancing rather than replacing current workflow processes, for digital humanities researchers to share their findings and collectively benefit from each other’s work

Annotation of Heterogenous Media Using OntoMedia

While ontologies exist for the annotation of monomedia, interoperability between these schemes is an important issue. The OntoMedia ontology consists of a generic core, capable of representing a diverse range of media, as well as extension ontologies to focus on specific formats. This paper provides an overview of the OntoMedia ontologies, together with a detailed case study when applied to video, a scripted form, and an associated short story

The Web of community trust : amateur fiction online : a case study in community focused design for the Semantic Web

This thesis describes a case study online community: online amateur authors. Taking this case study community as a base, this thesis considers how the concept of community is applied within the Semantic Web domain. Considering the community structures that can be demonstrated through the case study, this thesis makes the case for the recognition of a specific type of social network structure, one that fulfils the traditional definitions of ‘community’. We argue that this sub-type occupies an important position within social networks and our understanding of them due to the structures required for them to be so defined and that there are assumptions and inferences which can be made about nodes within this type of community group but not others. Having detailed our case study community and the type of network it represents, this thesis goes on to consider how the community could be supported beyond the mailing lists and journalling sites upon which it currently relies. Through our investigation of the community’s issues and requirements, we focus on identity and explore this concept within the context of community membership. Further we analyse the community practice of metadata annotation, in comparison to other metadata systems such as tagging, and as it related to the development of the community. We propose a number of ontological models which we argue could assist the community and, finally, consider ways in which these models could be made available to the community in keeping with current practice and level of technical knowledge as evidenced by the community.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Standards for Networking Ancient Person-data: Digital approaches to problems in prosopographical space

Prosopographies disambiguate names appearing in sources by creating lists of persons, but the progress of scholarship now makes these lists difficult to maintain. In a digital context unique stable identifiers can be reshuffled ad libitum when searching and ordering information. Digital data increasingly brings together complementary research outputs: the Standards for Networking Ancient Prosopographies project takes on the challenge of creating an aggregated resource, adopting a Linked Open Data approach. In this paper we shall present three case studies highlighting the promise and problems of encoding unambiguous identities, titulature and other disambiguating information, and treating divine figures as person-data, respectively. Digital approaches are tools for research, assisting rather than replacing the historian, who remains central to the research endeavor

Computer-Assisted Processing of Intertextuality in Ancient Languages

The production of digital critical editions of texts using TEI is now a widely-adopted procedure within digital humanities. The work described in this paper extends this approach to the publication of gnomologia (anthologies of wise sayings) , which formed a widespread literary genre in many cultures of the medieval Mediterranean. These texts are challenging because they were rarely copied straightforwardly ; rather , sayings were selected , reorganised , modified or re-attributed between manuscripts , resulting in a highly interconnected corpus for which a standard approach to digital publication is insufficient. Focusing on Greek and Arabic collections , we address this challenge using semantic web techniques to create an ecosystem of texts , relationships and annotations , and consider a new model – organic , collaborative , interconnected , and open-ended – of what constitutes an edition. This semantic web-based approach allows scholars to add their own materials and annotations to the network of information and to explore the conceptual networks that arise from these interconnected saying