Computational lexicography and digital epigraphy building digital lexica of fragmentary attested languages in the project DASI

Crossing Experiences in Digital Epigraphy

“…In relation to the public funding of the project and the policy adopted by the EC on Open Access to publications and research data, the DASI project has made available the entire archive in open-access modality. The DASI repository allows service providers to harvest its records through the OAI-PMH protocol (Avanzini et al, 2015).10 As the archive is not an aggregator in the strict sense, the DASI project has developed a general data model able to convey an accurate description of the material support, the historical and geographic context, and the textual content of the pre-Islamic inscriptions of the Arabian Peninsula, but not a proper schema. Therefore, the key point has been mapping the DASI data model to the DC elements set, as required by the OAI-PMH protocol, and to the EDM in order to expose records to the Europeana aggregation service, in addition to the mentioned EpiDoc subset.…”

“…The DASI Lexicon tool has its starting point in the list of words (excluding onomastic items) extracted from the texts encoded (Avanzini et al, 2015). Each of the word forms, corresponding to the items of the words' lists, is retrieved within the contexts of occurrence in the single inscription.…”

“…This tagging is intended to be carried out automatically by a computer. This is an important desideratum given that, in the DASI project,2 the grammatical features of a word can at present be assigned only manually (Avanzini et al, 2015).…”