The document presents an ontology called HuCit for modeling canonical citations in the humanities. It discusses related work on citation ontologies and systems for representing canonical works. It describes characteristics of canonical citations and examples of citation schemes used for authors like Aristotle, Homer, and Athenaeus. The document outlines HuCit's representation of citations, citation styles, textual structures, and how citations can act as resolvable pointers. The goal is to develop a conceptual model for encoding the semantics of canonical citations to support knowledge extraction from texts.

1. An Ontological View of Canonical Citations
Matteo Romanello1 Michele Pasin1
1 Department of Digital Humanities
King’s College London
Digital Humanities conference 2011
Stanford, California
21 June 2011
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2. Project Context
PhD at the DDH, KCL
discussion started during an internal Knowledge Representation
seminar
HuCit: ontology for the citations in the Humanities
part of a domain ontology for Classics
application: knowledge base to support the automatic extraction of
citations from text
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3. Related Work
Ontology Engineering
CiTO, Citation Typing Ontology
SWAN Ecosystem, esp. Scientific Discourse Ontology
OpenCyc
Canonical Citations
Canonical Text Services (CTS), Harvard Univ.
Classical Works Knowledge Base (CWKB), Cornell Univ.
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4. Canonical Citations
Motivation
precision of references to texts
persistency of citations
interoperability of citations across editions
Characteristics
are not tight to a specific edition of a text (loosely coupled)
canonical: result of an agreement within a specific community of practice
Examples
Hom. Il. 1.1
Athen. Deipn, X 412a
Arist. Poetics 1451a35-b6
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5. Citing Aristotle
Bekker numbers
derived from his edition (1831-1870) of Aristotle’s works
used by all scholarly editions
citation structure:
1451a35
page / column / line
/ [0-9]{4}[a-z]{1}[0-9]+ /
alternative citation structure:
eg: VIII 4 - IX 3
medieval system
book / chapter / sentence
Similar systems:
Stephanus page (Plutarch)
Casaubon page (Athenaeus)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bekker_numbers
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6. Citations in a print environment
Butcher’s edition (1922) p. 34 and Bekker’s edition (1831) p. 184
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7. FRBR in a nutshell
FRBR: Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records
Work: the abstract content of a Work (substance is concepts)
Expression: the text of a Work (substance is signs)
Manifestation: the physical carrier of an Expression
Example
Work: The abstract content of Homer’s Iliad
Expression: The text of Iliad in the Italian translation by the poet
Vincenzo Monti (XIX century)
Manifestation: A copy of V. Monti, Iliad, Milano : Mondadori, 1995
[isbn: 8804394846]
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8. HuCit’s Overview
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9. A Canonical Citation (macro level)
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10. Citation Styles
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11. Canonical Citation as resolvable pointer
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12. Citation Scheme and Textual Structure
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13. Textual Structure and Expressions
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14. Wrap up
Contribution
a conceptual model of how canonical citations work
a more abstract / application-independent model to encode
semantics of canon. citations
interoperability with other standards/protocols for canonical
citations (CTS, CWKB)
small ontology but mapped to other ontologies (CIDOC-CRM and
FRBRoo)
Ontology population
citations extracted from texts (JSTOR, APh)
textual structures to be extracted from TEI encoded texts
(Perseus)
reasoning over the KB to support automatic extraction
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