The document discusses the importance and utility of indexes in digital humanities, particularly in historical digital corpora, emphasizing that while they provide valuable references, they are often lacking due to economic constraints and the nature of digital texts. It explores how indexes can aid in understanding social networks and streamline information retrieval, contrasting their traditional use in print with their application in digital formats. The document also touches on semantic web principles and the role of ontologies in enhancing indexing practices.

1. 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]

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

9. 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.

10. 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

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

15. 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

16. 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

17. Index structure

35. 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

36. 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