From mythos to logos: A bilingual thesaurus tailored to meet user's needs within the ecosystem of cultural tourism

<p>Thesauri have long been recognized as valuable structured resources aiding Information Retrieval systems. A thesaurus provides a precise and controlled vocabulary which serves to coordinate data indexing and retrieval. The paper presents a bilingual Greek and English specialized thesaurus that is being developed as the backbone of a platform aimed at enhancing and enriching the cultural experiences of visitors in Eastern Macedonia and Thrace, Greece. The cultural component of the intended platform comprises textual data, images of artifacts and living entities (animals and plants in the area), as well as audio and video. The thesaurus covers the domains of Archaeology, Literature, Mythology, and Travel; therefore, it can be viewed as a set of inter­linked thesauri. Where applicable, terms and names in the database are also geo­referenced.</p&gt

From mythos to logos: A bilingual thesaurus tailored to meet users’ needs within the ecosystem of cultural tourism

Thesauri have long been recognized as valuable structured resources aiding Information Retrieval systems. A thesaurus provides a precise and controlled vocabulary which serves to coordinate data indexing and retrieval. The paper presents a bilingual Greek and English specialized thesaurus that is being developed as the backbone of a platform aimed at enhancing and enriching the cultural experiences of visitors in Eastern Macedonia and Thrace, Greece. The cultural component of the intended platform comprises textual data, images of artifacts and living entities (animals and plants in the area), as well as audio and video. The thesaurus covers the domains of Archaeology, Literature, Mythology, and Travel; therefore, it can be viewed as a set of inter-linked thesauri. Where applicable, terms and names in the database are also geo-referenced

Placing multi-modal, and multi-lingual data in the humanities domain on the map: The Mythotopia geotagged corpus

<p>The paper gives an account of an infrastructure that will be integrated into a platform aimed at providing a multi-faceted experience to visitors of Northern Greece using mythology as a starting point. This infrastructure comprises a multi-lingual and multi-modal corpus (i.e., a corpus of textual data supplemented with images and video) that belongs to the humanities domain along with a dedicated database (content management system) with advanced indexing, linking, and search functionalities. We will present the corpus itself focusing on the content, the methodology adopted for its development, and the steps taken towards rendering it accessible via the database in a way that also facilitates useful visualizations. In this context, we tried to address three main challenges: (a) to add a novel annotation layer, namely geotagging, (b) to ensure the long-term maintenance of and accessibility to the highly heterogeneous primary data – even after the life cycle of the current project – by adopting a metadata schema that is compatible to existing standards; and (c) to render the corpus a useful resource to scholarly research in the digital humanities by adding a minimum set of linguistic annotations.</p&gt

Exposing geospatial cultural heritage content in map-based applications

<p>This paper presents our implementation of interactive services related to map-based exploration of cultural heritage geospatial data. We first present our methodology for interlinking geographical entities (e.g., Points of Interest), i.e., the identification of same real-world geographical representations between different data sources. Then, we present efficient methods towards functionalities related to itinerary planning. The methods are part of the Mythotopia infrastructure which includes multilingual and multimodal digital content in the humanities, and advanced exploration-based functionalities. An interface allows users to interact and explore the rich content of the corpus.</p&gt

Language Resources for human-centric NLP: the MYTHOTOPIA geo-tagged dataset

<p>The quest for new explorations in the digital humanities domain brings about the notion of representation and organization of the data at hand that will allow not only for the efficient indexing and retrieval of the content but also for providing meaningful visualizations and new experiences for users. Lately, adding accurate geographical information that is relevant to the content of texts, images or videos has become of paramount importance not only to applications that seek to address the so-called "placing task" but also to tools aimed at visualizing the spatial features of texts. When performed manually, geo-tagging is a costly and time-consuming endeavour. To overcome this obstacle, domain-and language-specific tools for geotagging are required, that is, tools to automatically disambiguate names of localities, identify locations and geotag texts, images, audio, or video. In this regard, there is a need for hand-crafted quality datasets that are applicable for training and evaluating purposes. Our work seeks to address the above issues. We will, therefore, present an infrastructure aimed at providing a multi-faceted experience to visitors of Northern Greece using mythology as a starting point. This infrastructure comprises primarily a multi-lingual and multi-modal dataset (that is a corpus of textual data supplemented with images and videos) that belongs to the humanities domain; the corpus bears various annotations including geo-tagging. The backbone of the infrastructure is a content management system that facilitates advanced indexing, linking, and search functionalities. On top of this infrastructure, a tool creates sightseeing scenarios, i.e., itineraries for users based on their preferences. We will present the corpus itself focusing on the content and the steps taken towards rendering it accessible via the content management system in a way that also facilitates useful visualizations and human-centered applications.</p&gt

Mythotopia: The educational application

<p>Within the framework of the project "Mythological Routes in Eastern Macedonia and Thrace", Mythotopia was created, highlighting the cultural and tourist wealth of the area. The region is significant not only geographically or geomorphologically but also historically and archaeologically. Over the centuries, significant cultures developed on its lands. A particular characteristic is the coexistence and mixture of different cultural elements, leading to a unique multicultural result. The project uses as means to get acquainted with the area the myths handed down by ancient writers. Most of these myths are set or related in some way to the broader area or specific regions. Thus, beyond getting to know the place and creating personalized routes according to the searches of its visitors, the project aims to highlight these myths. Through their recording and projection, mapping, and identification of the corresponding areas, visitors learn unknown aspects of the rich local history, ancient Greek and Latin philology, archaeology, and many other elements.</p&gt

Mythotopia, Magical today, alive yesterday: Journeys in Eastern Macedonia & Thrace

<p>We present MYTHOTOPIA, a platform designed to provide a multifaceted experience to visitors of Eastern Macedonia and Thrace, using the region's mythological heritage as a starting point. The platform's linguistic content is set to significantly enhance the current National Infrastructure for Digital Humanities and Greek Linguistic Research and Innovation APOLLONIS, in which ILSP/Athena R.C. is already actively involved as a beneficiary of one of the main sub-projects of the corresponding Act. MYTHOTOPIA consists of a multilingual and multimodal data corpus from the field of Humanities, which, through a specially designed content management system, features indexing, linking, and various types of search functionalities. The focus of the presentation is on the data corpora, emphasizing their content, the methodology used for their development, and their presentation through the database. MYTHOTOPIA's cultural content combines textual data (classic literary texts with their translations as well as originals in Greek and English), depictions of mythological themes in ancient art, sound files, videos, and original photographic material from the region. A key element of MYTHOTOPIA is a bilingual (Greek and English) thesaurus created for content entry, supporting appropriate indexing and retrieval of the original data. The thesaurus content covers the fields of archaeology, literature, mythology, and tourism. Additionally, geospatial data of interest were added to the database to link content to the real exploratory experience of visitors, while the long-term preservation and accessibility of heterogeneous original data were ensured through the use of the appropriate metadata schema.</p&gt