I1 sorin hermon_ancient_wisdom

Editor's Notes

• #3: Ancient inscriptions are one of the most direct evidences of past activities, ideas, or events as narrated for posterity by past people. Understanding the intrinsic information embedded in ancient inscriptions may serve as a first source of gathering information about past societies, individuals, historic events or religious / mystical beliefs of cultures in the past. They are also a valuable link between history and archaeology, archaeology and social sciences, history and geology, gender studies and sociology, philosophy of religion or history of sciences. Ancient inscriptions may be investigated by many different, but complementary disciplines: archaeology (investigating, among others, the context of the finds themselves), geology (providing details on the material upon which inscriptions were carved), philology (analyzing for example the text, the writing style, the scripture, etc.) or studies revealing aspects of their carving, preservation, conservation, etc. Additional information may regard methods of their investigation: under microscope, 3D documentation, photographic campaign or musealization.
• #4: Recent developments in Internet technologies enhanced the access to information and triggered a tremendous effort in creating online accessible repositories of information regarding, among others, ancient inscriptions. In the past few years, several projects on digital epigraphy made inscriptions available to the wider community and have greatly contributed to sharing, understanding and studying ancient inscriptions. Scholars promoted initiatives and conventions to electronically transfer ancient texts (such as Greek and Latin inscriptions) and faced the peculiarities of presenting and editing inscriptions in digital repositories. The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) for Epigraphy (EpiDoc) has been a major starting point towards the standardization of electronic publication of Greek and Latin inscriptions, which has been spread and applied by various digital epigraphy projects. At the same time, researchers in digital epigraphy developed various tools to advance the study and research of inscriptions online. Consequently, such effort highlighted the importance of having explicit descriptions of terminologies, shared vocabulary and agreed upon thesauri, the ultimate goal being the development of domain ontologies, the basis of shared, distributed repositories of knowledge on Ancient Inscriptions. These will help in their turn in creating cross-disciplinary digital libraries for ancient inscriptions, which, together with digital tools for interaction with such content, will compose the research infrastructures of tomorrow.
• #5: This contribution presents an ongoing research on the development of a cross-disciplinary metadata for Ancient Cypriot inscriptions, integrating information regarding the objects themselves and their digital “surrogates” (3D models, photographic documentation, digital texts, transliterations, etc.), within the frame of EAGLE, “Europeana network of Ancient Greek and Latin Epigraphy”, an EU funded project under the umbrella of the CIP-Best Practice Network.
• #6: Cyprus Institute (CyI) is among the content providers that will contribute Ancient Cypriot literary inscriptions which will derive from the Archaia Kypriaki Grammateia Digital Corpus (AKGDC) project, funded by the A.G. Leventis Foundation [5]. The project contains a corpus of Ancient texts that includes a wide range of literary genres such as epic, lyric and dramatic poetry, epigrams inscribed on stone, prose, medical and philosophical texts and covers the ancient Cypriot literary production in a time span of c. thirteen centuries (from the 7th century BC to the 6th century AD). Consequently, the research presented here, on the cross-disciplinary metadata schema for Ancient Cypriot inscriptions, is based on the set of inscriptions that will be published online within the AKGDC project.
• #11: The Real World Object
• #12: The Real World Object The inscriptions
• #13: The digital surrogates The digital provenance
• #14: The digital surrogates The digital provenance
• #15: A repository containing a rich, multi-disciplinary metadata descriptive content, coupled with data organised according to a conceptual reference model (e.g. CIDOC-CRM) has several immediate benefits: it better and more accurately reflects the nature of past artefacts and better represents their multi-layered nature, it helps gaining new insights embedded in such objects and enhances the transparency of their interpretation. Moreover, such an approach enhances the integration of the repository into a wider perspective and enables its incorporation in global research infrastructures to be developed in the future. ARIADNE, a newly established EU funded project aimed at developing a digital infrastructure for archaeological research, is one of the best candidates for providing such an integrative platform. As such, organising data according to a rich, cross-domain metadata and to a standard conceptual reference model (CIDOC-CRM) is the first step towards achieving a multi-disciplinary research infrastructure. http://www.ariadne-infrastructure.eu
• #16: CyI, as Content Provider, will afford Europeana the metadata of the Cypriot inscription corpus, enabling a wider visibility and increased awareness to the Archaia Kypriaki Grammateia Digital Corpus Project (AKGDC). Within the framework of the EAGLE, the most prominent European institutions and archives in the field of Classical Latin and Greek epigraphy, will provide Europeana with a collection of unique historical sources. In particular, it will supply inscriptions coming from 25 countries, providing more than 1.5 M of images and related metadata, including translations of selected texts for the benefit of the  general public. This aggregation process will be possible through the mapping from the metadata schema used by the Content Providers participating in the project to a common inscription-specific metadata model (developed within the project community) based on standards and recommendations (developed through related Europeana projects) and a service platform for epigraphy to allow for multi-format ingestion and multi-device. The publication into Europeana, since it is a web portal ''public users-driven'', guarantees at the one hand more visibility for the Cultural Institution within a wider community [13], presenting to the general public a type of subject usually addressed to small communities and often not published online. On the other hand, Europeana will host the contribution of specific content that it was not contemplated previously as a stand-alone aggregation, and maybe it was just published as an item inside museum collections that of course describe it as a museum artefact and not as an inscription. In this way, Europeana will be enriched with a critical mass of  quality-oriented content.