Building Scholar e-communities Using a Semantically Aware Framework: Archaia Kypriaki Grammateia Digital Corpus

Abstract

Web-based learning communities have developed into a very popular vehicle for sharing information amongst students, researchers and enthusiastic users and are slowly gaining importance in the humanities field. Unfortunately, as data organization and information exchange in such communities are usually unstructured and strongly geo-localized, they generate serious interoperability issues. At the same time, an increasing amount of knowledge based resources is made available on the Web and a lot of effort is put into creating reference ontologies for the Cultural Heritage, actively publishing controlled vocabularies and sharing data across different platforms by using RDF and RDFa. In this context and with the objective to consolidate these two independent efforts, we have developed a platform for advanced structured online collaboration as a framework for advanced e-learning, the Archaia Kypriaki Grammateia Digital Corpus (AKGDC). Our Digital Library supports exchange amongst researchers, educators and students, makes heterogeneous data resources available and easily reusable and suggests semantic relations within the resources. The AKGDC framework is based on a rather comprehensive corpus of the ancient Cypriot literature, the six-volume ''Archaia Kypriaki Grammateia'', or Arca´ia Kupriak ´h Gra ate´ia authored by A. Voskos, K. Michaelides and I. G. Taifacos and published by the Leventis Foundation between 1995 and 2008. The corpus covers the ancient Cypriot literary production of approximately thirteen centuries (from 7th century BC to 5th-6th century AD), and is typically classified by literary genres. This paper describes how the Digital Library has been conceptualized, developed and enriched. We expect our DL to positively impact highly interdisciplinary areas, such as Classical philology, archaeology, epigraphics, history, religion, philosophy, as well as to provide a broad utility service across the scholarly community.