AUTHOR=Zhitomirsky-Geffet Maayan , Prebor Gila TITLE=Toward an Ontopedia for Historical Hebrew Manuscripts JOURNAL=Frontiers in Digital Humanities VOLUME=3 YEAR=2016 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/digital-humanities/articles/10.3389/fdigh.2016.00003 DOI=10.3389/fdigh.2016.00003 ISSN=2297-2668 ABSTRACT=

Historical handwritten Hebrew manuscripts are one of the most unique and authentic witnesses of Jewish culture and thought that survived through the centuries. In order to enable a systematic research of the knowledge embedded in the manuscripts, there is a need for a formal conceptual data model with a high level of semantic granularity, an ontology. We propose to build a dynamic web-based framework that will allow scholars to create, enrich, and consult an “ontopedia” (ontology-based encyclopedia) of Hebrew manuscripts. The framework is based on an ontology especially designed and implemented for this domain and goals. We view a manuscript as a “living entity” and propose to design a new ontological data model of the narrative for a manuscript, stages/milestones in its biography (creation, copying, and acquisition). A sequence of events and places constitutes a timeline of history against which manuscripts, people, and their relationships can be placed. A large-scale automated reasoning based on the ontology will also enable us to construct a semantically rich social network of people and manuscripts, and to compare the effect of time and place on the manuscripts’ qualitative characteristics and quantitative distribution.