Toward an Ontopedia for Historical Hebrew Manuscripts

Abstract

Historical handwritten Hebrew manuscripts are one of the most unique and authentic witnesses of Jewish culture and thought that survived through the centuries. In order to enable a systematic research of the knowledge embedded in the manuscripts, there is a need for a formal conceptual data model with a high level of semantic granularity, an ontology. We propose to build a dynamic web-based framework that will allow scholars to create, enrich, and consult an "ontopedia" (ontology-based encyclopedia) of Hebrew manuscripts. The framework is based on an ontology especially designed and implemented for this domain and goals. We view a manuscript as a "living entity" and propose to design a new ontological data model of the narrative for a manuscript, stages/milestones in its biography (creation, copying, and acquisition). A sequence of events and places constitutes a timeline of history against which manuscripts, people, and their relationships can be placed. A large-scale automated reasoning based on the ontology will also enable us to construct a semantically rich social network of people and manuscripts, and to compare the effect of time and place on the manuscripts' qualitative characteristics and quantitative distribution.

Citation network analysis for viewpoint plurality assessment of historical corpora: The case of the medieval rabbinic literature

“…Historians and scholars specializing in Rabbinic literature possess the expertise to provide interpretation and conduct close-reading analysis of the phenomena identified in this study. The reasons for the identified phenomena could be multifaceted, including the different historical periods and geographic location in which the authors lived, community sizes, intra-community author relationships, the degree of students’ adherence to their teachers, authors’ and communities’ migration and major historical events that influenced the Jewish communities [ 64 , 89 ]. Moreover, the citation network, mapping the inter-community relationships ( Fig 12 ), may offer valuable insights into the cultural ties and influences among dispersed Jewish communities worldwide.…”

What do they make us see: a comparative study of cultural bias in online databases of two large museums

“…3.2.2 Database mapping. Cultural heritage institutions do not have one standard for knowledge management (Zhitomirsky- Geffet and Prebor, 2016;Estermann and Schneeberger, 2017), and therefore in order to analyze and compare item distributions according to different variables in different databases, it is necessary to identify and adjust the corresponding fields in the databases.…”

Ontology‐based analysis of the large collection of historical Hebrew manuscripts

“…The examined catalogue comprises over 130,000 records maintained by the National Library of Israel (http://web.nli.org.il/sites/NLI/English/collections/manuscripts) which cover over 95% of all the Hebrew manuscripts that survived in the world through the centuries. Although catalogue data is assumed to be structured, in the previous research (Zhitomirsky‐Geffet and Prebor, ) substantial inconsistencies have been detected and many of the examined fields required further structuring and reorganization into atomic searchable entities. Beyond the methodological significance of the data‐driven research in the field of Digital Humanities (Kaplan and di Linardo, 2017; Lei Zeng, ), its results might shed new light on historical, linguistic, religious, ethnological, philosophical and social aspects of Jewish life in different time periods and places, since Hebrew manuscripts constitute one of the most unique and authentic witnesses of the Jewish culture.…”