Studying the History of Pre-modern Zoology by Extracting Linked Zoological Data from Mediaeval Texts and Reasoning on It

In this paper we first present the international multidisciplinary research network Zoomathia, which aims at studying the transmission of zoological knowledge from Antiquity to Middle Ages through varied resources, and considers especially textual information, including compilation literature such as encyclopaedias. We then present a preliminary work in the context of Zoomathia consisting in i extracting pertinent knowledge from mediaeval texts using Natural Language Processing NLP methods, ii semantically enriching semi-structured zoological data and publishing it as an RDF dataset and its vocabulary, linked to other relevant Linked Data sources, and iii reasoning on this linked RDF data to help epistemologists, historians and philologists in their analysis of these ancient texts. This paper is an extended and updated version ofi¾ź[13].

[1]  Serena Villata,et al.  Studying the History of Pre-Modern Zoology with Linked Data and Vocabularies , 2015, SW4SHD@ESWC.

[2]  Roberto Navigli.  A Quick Tour of BabelNet 1.1 , 2013, CICLing.

[3]  Antoine Isaac,et al.  Supporting Linked Data Production for Cultural Heritage Institutes: The Amsterdam Museum Case Study , 2012, ESWC.

[4]  Lora Aroyo,et al.  Semantic annotation and search of cultural-heritage collections: The MultimediaN E-Culture demonstrator , 2008, J. Web Semant..

[5]  Michiel Hildebrand.  Interactive Exploration of Heterogeneous Cultural Heritage Collections , 2008, International Semantic Web Conference.

[6]  Antoine Isaac,et al.  Amsterdam Museum Linked Open Data , 2013, Semantic Web.

[7]  Johan Montagnat,et al.  Towards a Shared Reference Thesaurus for Studies on History of Zoology, Archaeozoology and Conservation Biology , 2015, SW4SHD@ESWC.

[8]  Tom Elliott,et al.  Digital Geography and Classics , 2009, Digit. Humanit. Q..

[9]  Leif Isaksen,et al.  Pelagios and the emerging graph of ancient world data , 2014, WebSci '14.

[10]  Lora Aroyo,et al.  Using Linked Data to Diversify Search Results a Case Study in Cultural Heritage , 2014, EKAW.

[11]  Mike Jackson,et al.  Building Bridges between Islands of Data - An Investigation into Distributed Data Management in the Humanities , 2009, 2009 Fifth IEEE International Conference on e-Science.

[12]  James G. Lennox,et al.  The Disappearance of Aristotle's Biology: A Hellenistic Mystery , 1994 .

[13]  Aitor Gonzalez-Agirre,et al.  A Graph-Based Method to Improve WordNet Domains , 2012, CICLing.