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Eliciting the Ancient Geography from a Digital Library of Latin Texts

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Digital Libraries and Multimedia Archives (IRCDL 2018)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 806))

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Abstract

Geolat – Geography for Latin Literature is a research project, aimed at making accessible a digital library containing the works of Latin literature (from its origins in 240 BCE to the end of the Roman Empire in 476 CE) through a query interface of geographic/cartographic type representing the geographic knowledge expressed in the Latin texts themselves. A core activity of the project has been the development of the ontology GO!, which describes the geographical knowledge contained in the texts of the library. The ontologically annotated texts will allow for a variety of scientifically relevant uses, apart from the geo-based browsing: for example the production of digital and printed critical editions. The project is under development at Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici of Università del Piemonte Orientale, and financially supported by Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    M. Lana is specifically responsible for Sects. 1 and 5, and T. Tambassi for Sects. 2–4.

  2. 2.

    Until now the Latin texts are offered with no translation because even if translations do exist for them, recent translations are protected by Intellectual Property Rights; and if they are free from IPR they are generally speaking too remote from today sensibility to be usable.

  3. 3.

    A thorough description of this phase is Tambassi T.: Rethinking Geo-Ontologies from a Philosophical Point of View. Journal of Research and Didactics in Geography (J-Reading) 2(5), 51–62 (2016), https://doi.org/10.4458/7800-04. Geo-Ontologies can be broadly distinguished among geomatics, topological and geometrical ontologies: see e.g. OGC GeoSPARQL, Spatial Schema – ISO 19107, Spatial referencing by coordinates - ISO 19111; physical and natural ontologies: see e.g. NDH Ontology (USGS) and Hydro Ontology (Spanish GeoData); human ontologies: see e.g. FAO Geopolitical Ontology. Well known ontologies like DOLCE, CIDOC-CRM, FRBR were not used because they don’t offer a sufficiently detailed characterization of the geographical knowledge.

  4. 4.

    “Classes are used to group individuals that have something in common in order to refer to them. […] In modeling, classes are often used to denote the set of objects comprised by a concept of human thinking, like the concept person or the concept woman.” OWL 2 Web Ontology Language Primer (Second Edition), https://www.w3.org/2007/OWL/wiki/Primer.

  5. 5.

    “In OWL 2, we denote … relations as properties. Properties are further subdivided: Object properties relate objects to objects (like a person to their spouse), while datatype properties assign data values to objects (like an age to a person)” (id.).

  6. 6.

    The group working to the ontology was made by a computer scientist, Diego Magro; a philosophy postdoc, Timothy Tambassi; a digital humanist, Maurizio Lana; plus a group of people who wrote and then revised the OWL ontology: Claudia Corcione, Paola De Caro, Silvia Naro and Marco Rovera. The group comprises also Gabriella Vanotti, ancient history; Cristina Meini, philosophy of language; Margherita Benzi, philosophy of science; and †Roberta Piastri, Latin literature.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici, Università del Piemonte Orientale, Piazza Roma 36, 13100, Vercelli, Italy

    Maurizio Lana

  2. ICUB, University of Bucharest, 1 Dimitrie Brandza St., 060102, Bucharest, Romania

    Timothy Tambassi

Authors
  1. Maurizio Lana
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  2. Timothy Tambassi
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Correspondence to Timothy Tambassi .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Udine, Udine, Italy

    Giuseppe Serra

  2. University of Udine, Udine, Italy

    Carlo Tasso

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Lana, M., Tambassi, T. (2018). Eliciting the Ancient Geography from a Digital Library of Latin Texts. In: Serra, G., Tasso, C. (eds) Digital Libraries and Multimedia Archives. IRCDL 2018. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 806. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73165-0_19

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73165-0_19

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