Formal Ontologies, Linked Data, and TEI Semantics

The Seventies Sociality: Activist Publishers and the Digital Commonplacing of New Knowledge

“…RDF, the XML-based linked data format was an added output that would be nice to have, but that was not critical to ultimate success of the projects. The recent catalyzation of interest in linked open data in the context of TEI (including the genesis of projects like the Canadian Research Writing Collaboratory and the recent revitalization of digital humanities linked data special interest groups) is, however, a promising sign of our field's engagement with linked data, and our readiness to join international efforts to produce and publish linked data based on the resources we already publish and the skills we already have (Ciotti and Tomasi 2016;Huber et al 2014;Pattuelli et al 2013;Lehmann et al 2012;Shadbolt et al 2012;Hellmann et al 2014).…”

“…Despite calls in the digital humanities for TEI-linked data compatibility (Simpson and Brown 2014;Ciotti and Tomasi 2016), scholars have yet to develop best practices for creating linked data from richly encoded TEI resources. For many projects, the production of linked data is an ancillary goal-one that would be gratifying to achieve, but that is secondary to the encoding itself, or one that is only necessary to facilitate aggregation.…”

Exercises in modelling: textual variants

“…Among the theoretical challenges, on the other hand, there is the possibility to call into question the way texts are employed and consumed, which is not unrelated to the way they are visualized. This means, for 25 The graph structure is prominent in research connected to modelling text (Haentjens Dekker and Birnbaum 2017), semantic editions (Eide 2014), (Ciotti and Tomasi 2016), (Tomasi et al 2018), software framework infrastructures based on graph solutions, such as Knora <http://www.knora.org/> (last access May 6, 2019) and Alexandria Markup Text Repository (Haentjens Dekker and Birnbaum 2017). 26 The first mention of RDF in the TEI-List goes back to 1999, see <https://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgibin/wa?A0=TEI-L> (last access May 6, 2019).…”

Agree to disagree: Modelling co-existing scholarly perspectives on literary text

“…As XML elements are usually meaningful items in a natural language, some users are inclined to assume that the meaning of markup is as clear to the processor as it is to them. But, as Fabio Ciotti and Francesca Tomasi point out (Ciotti and Tomasi, 2016), the XML processor has no access to the meaning behind XML elements: it only validates the grammatical wellformedness of the XML document and does not understand that the XML element <pers> signifies 'person'. 7 What is more, one scholar's particular use of tags is not necessarily shared among their scholarly peers: editors and text encoders may disagree on the use of particular elements to tag a certain textual feature.…”

“…EARMARK also expresses textual information in RDF statements that are embedded in an XML document. More recent work on markup semantics is presented in Ciotti and Tomasi (2016) and Ciotti (2018) who propose an extensive proof-of-concept using LA-EARMARK (an extension of EARMARK using the Linguistic Annotation ontology) to formally describe a core set of TEI elements in order to create a TEI Ontology: 'a subset of shared assumptions, a common ground of notions about the role and meaning of TEI markup' (Ciotti, 2018, p. 143). This approach, too, takes into account the need for specific user ontologies: subsets of RDF statements that formalize the specific understanding of an individual user, which in turn would facilitate the exchange of textual data.…”