Index nominum to ontology

Index nominum to ontology
How to use index to highlight social networks in historical digital corpora ?
6 juillet 2006 – Digital Humanities Gautier Poupeau, [email_address]

What is an index ?
Index nominum is exhaustive
Index rerum is selective
Essential for paper book
Find an accurate reference without full-text search
Panorama of the content
Index presentations are not standardised
A quarter of time of editor dedicated to devising index
Definition :an index is an alphabetic list of standardised entries with the reference allowing to locate them.
Person and place name for index nominum
Dealed subject for index rerum

Why are indexes lacking in digital corpora ?
The great majority of digital corpora are not critical edition but textual databases
Economical problem (a quarter of editor's time to make an index...)
Full-text search
Index nominum had not its place in these publications dedicated to search of accurate references, rather than information browsing

Plan
Index are often lacking in digital corpora, although they can be useful. Why are they lacking ? How can they be useful ?
How to use index information to create knowledge with Semantic Web principles and tools ?
To transcend the index traditional notion. Index as a tool to study the social networks in historical digital corpora

Why is index useful for digital corpora ?
The index helps the editor to have a better understanding of the edited source
Panorama of the content like in a paper book
with hypertext, index is a powerful and easy tool

Why is index useful for digital corpora ?
toponyms and person names writings are the most disparate : limit for automatical lemmatisation and answer if lemmatisation is impossible
Habit to make an index for academics.

Index in digital context
Alphabetic list is just the result of the process of gathering every point referenced and associated to a stadardised entry in the text
Inverse of paper index conception
Independance of the index in relation to page setting and pagination for a paper book or choice of logical structure for a digital book

Index and TEI : Two methods
<index/> element
<persName> and <placeName> elements

Semantic Web
W3C activities : research, recommendations and tools
Goals : give signification to information on the Web in order to share it better
W3C semantic stack

Ontology
In philosophy, the ontology is the study of being or existence
In knowledge management, an ontology is a data model that represents a domain and is used to reason about the objects in that domain and the relations between them.
W3C recommendation to define an ontology : OWL (Web ontology language) based on RDF model

Index structure

Differents role for OWL file
Authority file, a meta index for different corpora
Informations can be added in this file
role in the document
gender
biographical mention
mention about relation between persons and between persons and places
prosopographical database

Symmetric property, e. g. : property « brother/sister of » is symmetric. If A is « brother/sister of » B, so B is brother/sister of A
InverseOf, e.g. : property « childOf » inverse of « parentOf. If A childOf B, so B parentOf A
Property Characteristics

Index nominum to ontology

by Gautier Poupeau on Oct 05, 2008

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Index nominum to ontology — Presentation Transcript