Rethinking Critical Editions of Fragments by Ontologies
1. Introduction Problem Approach Conclusions
Rethinking Critical Editions of
Fragmentary Texts by Ontologies
Matteo Romanello1 Monica Berti1 Federico Boschetti1
Gregory Crane1
1 The Perseus Project - Tufts University Medford, MA (USA)
Electronic Publishing Conference, 2009
Rethinking Fragments by Ontologies
2. Introduction Problem Approach Conclusions
Summary
Introduction
Representing Fragments
Ontology Modeling + Ontology Learning
Conclusions
Rethinking Fragments by Ontologies
3. Introduction Problem Approach Conclusions
Scope
Materials:
Classical (Greek and Latin) Literary Texts
Critical editions of Fragmentary Texts
Importance:
59% authors are preserved only in fragments
29% . . . just by entirely preserved works
12% . . . by both entirely preserved works and fragments
Goal:
Rethinking the critical edition of fragments -> general model to
represent fragmentary texts in a digital environment
Rethinking Fragments by Ontologies
4. Introduction Problem Approach Conclusions
Definitions
Fragment
is a quotation of a text embedded into another text
Witness
is the text preserving a fragment of a lost work
Critical edition of fragmentary texts
-> establishing the original text of the lost work passage,
preserved through a quotation by another author
-> attributing the text to a work, to an author, collocation
within the original work
Rethinking Fragments by Ontologies
5. Introduction Problem Approach Conclusions
Information in a fragment:
Concordances between numbering in different editions
Reference to the witness: link to a specific edition of a
witness
Multiple editions: boundaries of the fragment vary from
edition to edition
Critical apparatus information
Rethinking Fragments by Ontologies
6. Introduction Problem Approach Conclusions
State of the Art
Digital Editions of Fragment Witnesses
TLG [online] <HTML>
Perseus [online] <HTML + TEI-XML>
Google Books, archive.org [online] <PDF>
1k Years of Greek [ongoing] <TEI-XML>
Ongoing Projects on Digital Collections of Fragmentary
Texts
Fragments of Greek Historians (Perseus Project)
iMouseion Presocratics Project
Fragments of Demetrios of Scepsi (University of Hamburg)
Rethinking Fragments by Ontologies
7. Introduction Problem Approach Conclusions
Rethinking Critical Editions
From the printed to the digital edition. . .
From duplicating fragment and witness text
To linking fragment to the witness’ text
-> corpora of texts without duplicated records
Assumption:
Fragments are metatexts rather than texts: representing
fragments means representing scholars’ interpretations about
survived texts
Solution:
Markup of fragments -> Fragments as sets of ontological
metadata linked to the text of witnesses
Rethinking Fragments by Ontologies
8. Introduction Problem Approach Conclusions
Knowledge Domain Analysis
Need for Ontology Learning
Building an ontology: can be an arbitrary operation, i.e.
subjective description of a knowledge domain
The natural language reflects how insiders see domain
specific problems
Ontology Learning techniques (specifically semantic
spaces analysis) -> exploit text corpora in order to found
the ontology building
Concepts and relations identification: results of the
analysis of data (objective and repeatable process).
Rethinking Fragments by Ontologies
9. Introduction Problem Approach Conclusions
Knowledge Domain Analysis
Corpus of 170 articles in
English selected by an expert
Preprocessing: lemmatization
and POS tagging
Extraction of relevant terms
Clusterization with k-means
algorithm: original semantic
space dimensions are reduced
to 2 and represented in a
bidimensional graph
Rethinking Fragments by Ontologies
10. Introduction Problem Approach Conclusions
Ontology Axioms
Cluster #1: fragment as interpretation
fragment, uncertainty, possibility, supposition, debate,
interpretation, certainty, evidence ...
Cluster #2: scholars’ interpretations
variant, reading, emendation, conjecture, correction,
quotation, corruption ...
Cluster #3: pointing to the text
beginning, end, block, line, space, place, continuation, top,
bottom, left, right, margin ...
Rethinking Fragments by Ontologies
11. Introduction Problem Approach Conclusions
Ontology Design
1 Fragment as interpretations
Fragment -> Interpretation backed by a publication
(bibliographic record)
Fragment: (instanceOf) TextualInterpretation subclassOf
philosurfical:Interpretation
FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic
Records): multiple editions of a single text
(Work/Exemplars,Conceptual Object/Information Object )
Doubt and Uncertainty -> W3C Uncertainty Ontology
Built on CIDOC CRM
Rethinking Fragments by Ontologies
12. Introduction Problem Approach Conclusions
Ontology Design
2 Scholars’ Interpretations
introduction of specific classes to represent concepts of
the Philology Domain:
TextPassage
Conjecture/Variant Reading
...
3 Pointing to Text
Resources -> URI
Text Passages -> CTS URNs
Retrieve text passages -> CTS URNs + CTS protocol
Rethinking Fragments by Ontologies
13. Introduction Problem Approach Conclusions
Benefits
Solid architecture -> different layers (texts/interpretations)
Ontologies help us to formalize correctly the representation
of a knowledge domain
Data interoperability
Ontology inferred from data and then modeled using
Design Patterns and well established ontologies
Rethinking Fragments by Ontologies
