Twinning Classics and A.I.: Building the new generation of ontology-based lexicographical tools and resources for Humanists on the Semantic Web

This Twin Talk is about the ongoing collaboration between an expert in Classics and an expert in Artificial Intelligence (A.I.). Our approach set out to answer two interlinked issues, ubiquitous in the study of material culture: first, pairing things to their names (designations) and, second, having access to multilingual digital resources that provide information on things and their designations. Our chosen domain of application was ancient Greek dress, an iconic feature of ancient Greek culture offering a privileged window into the Greek belief systems and societal values. Our goal was to place the Humanist/domain expert at the centre of the endeavour enabling her to build the formal domain ontology, without requiring the assistance of an ontology engineer. The role of A.I. was to provide automations that lower the cognitive load for users unfamiliar with knowledge modelling. Building the model consisted in distinguishing between concept level (i.e. the stable domain knowledge) and term level (i.e. the terms that name the concepts in different natural languages), putting these into relation (i.e. linking the terms in different languages to their denoted concepts), and providing complete and consistent definitions for concepts (in formal language) and terms (in natural language).

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