Ontological Representation of Ancient Sumerian Literature

T ERHI N URMIKKO
tmtn1g10@soton.ac.uk @tmtn http://www.linkedin.com/in/terhinurmikko http://soton.academia.edu/TerhiNurmikko

Introduction
This research project combines elements from two existing but quite dissimilar academic disciplines semantic web technologies from the sphere of Computer and Internet Science and Assyriology, the study of the most ancient of written documents from the Middle East. The aim has been to establish the needs and desires of the target domain of Assyriology and to assess the extent to which existing and easily adaptable technological tools from the sphere of semantic technologies can support scholarship in that field.

Assyriology
Assyriology is the linguistic, archaeological, cultural, historical and curatorial study of the material and literary culture of ancient Mesopotamia, geographical the area that constitutes modern day Iraq. The range of acceptable timelines within the scope of Assyriology is extensive, spanning several millennia. This research project focuses exclusively on Sumerian literary compositions much of this ancient material originates from the third and second millennia BC. Around this time Sumerian probably died out as a spoken language (for the exception of small pockets of continued use) but survived as the language of religion, politics and science for several centuries more. Knowledge of Sumerian remained a statussymbol of the educated and a popular axiom in Assyriology equates the role of Sumerian with that of Latin in Europe in the Middle Ages.

Iraq

This interdisciplinary PhD research topic examines literary compositions written in the ancient language of Sumerian, in a script known as

Ontologies
Ontology
The term ontology is one coined for Philosophy, but adopted and adapted by Computer Science, but in this
Formalise Express Structure

cuneiform.
I examine the suitability of existing semantic technologies as tools for publishing these texts in a machine-readable format.

context it refers to a structural framework which can be used to represent a given domain: the set of concepts which constitute a universe of discourse, and the relationships between them.

CONTENT

The aim of ontologies is to facilitate the representation of data in machine-readable formats, and enable automated reasoning. Online publication of data with adherence to

Granularity Domain Knowledge

known and shared vocabularies and ontologies enables the inclusion of data from various separate data sets, and helps enrich the knowledge of any one subject or domain (in other words, to link data). The three main ontologies used in this research have been the CIDOC Conceptual Reference

Hypothesis
Having been purposely designed to represent cultural heritage, narrative and bibliographical data, the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM), Ontomedia and FRBRoo are suitable for the representation of the heterogeneous, incomplete and unknown narratives in Sumerian literary compositions and their associated metadata.

Entities Relationships

Model (CIDOC CRM), designed specifically for cultural heritage data; Ontomedia, for the representation of fictional narratives and FRBRoo, for bibliographical data.

Methodology
Assyriology is approached from the philological perspective, focusing on literary criticism and linguistic analysis, following in the foot-steps of recent scholarly work in the area (Delnero, 2006; Delnero 2012; Worthington 2012). The specifications and requirements of the discipline have been established through evidence of publication topics in major journals, recent conferences and workshops and introspective analysis, based on earlier academic research involving the Sumerian language. The OWL (Web Ontology Language) ontologies used as part of this research have been implemented using the Stanford University Ontological Editor, Protg. For the purposes of ease of expression, the ontological structure containing the aforementioned three ontologies is referred to as mORSuL (multi-Ontology for the Representation of Sumerian Literature).

ETCSL
Cuneiform emerged from a tradition of administration and record-keeping during the fourth millennium BC. By the third millennium BC, many non-administrative genres such as literature had appeared, but as pieces are known from geographically diverse locations, it is likely that the origins for this genre lay somewhere in earlier history.
Composite Text Witness tablet Witness tablet Witness tablet Oral traditions, commissions, other sources

The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL) is a project of the University of Oxford and the mode of publication for some 400 composite text versions of Sumerian literary compositions.
Translation in Prose

Academic supervisors: Dr Graeme Earl and Dr Nicholas Gibbins, the University of Southampton and Dr Jacob Dahl, the University of Oxford. Funding: the Web Science Doctoral Training Centre at the University of Southampton, the Web Science Trust and the Digital Economy. The Digital Economy Programme is a Research Councils UK cross-council initiative led by EPSRC and contributed to by AHRC, ESRC and MRC.