Using RDFa to Link Text and Dictionary Data for Medieval French Sabine Tittel,∗ Helena Bermúdez-Sabel, Christian Chiarcos◦ ∗Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Heidelberg, Germany Laboratorio de Innovación en Humanidades Digitales, UNED, Madrid, Spain ◦Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main, Germany [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] Abstract This paper presents an endeavor to transform a scholarly text edition (of a medical treatise written in Middle French) into a digital edition enriched with references to an on-line dictionary. Hitherto published as a book, the resulting digital edition will use RDFa to interlink its vocabulary with the corresponding lexical entries of the Dictionnaire étymologique de l’ancien français (DEAF). We demonstrate the feasibility of RDFa for the semantic enrichment of digital editions within the philologies. In particular, the technological support for RDFa excels beyond domain-specific solutions favored by the TEI community. Our findings may thus contribute to future technological bridges between TEI/XML and (Linguistic) Linked Open Data resources. The original data of the edition is available in a LATEX format that includes profound semantic markup. We convert this data into XML/TEI, and integrate RDFa-compliant attributes for every lexeme attested in the text. The HTML5 edition generated from the XML sources preserves the RDFa attributes and thus (a) embeds (links) its vocabulary within the overall system of the medieval French language, and that (b) provides and displays linguistic features (say, sense definitions given in the original corpus data) along with the critical apparatus of the original book publication. Keywords: TEI, RDFa, LATEX, Digital Scholarly Text Edition, Lexicography, Old French, Middle French. 1. Introduction readable view, optimized for a particular way of visual ar- rangement, whereas the underlying semantics are left im- In the field of textual philology of Medieval French, the plicit (and thus cannot be easily recovered for applications traditional way to print books from a scholarly text edi- to be developed on top of these resources, say, tools for tion is still the publication method of choice. The number the automatically supported linguistic analysis of Medieval of digitally published editions of Old and Middle French French). The Resource Description Framework (RDF)1 is is growing at a pace that is rather slow compared to the designed as a means to complement or to replace conven- text editions of modern texts. The results are embrac- tional hyperlinks with semantically typed links. However, ing a wide spectrum of approaches from retro-digitization the state of the art in this area is defined by the XML spec- (Reisdoerfer, 1996a; Reisdoerfer, 1996b; Harsch, 1996) to ifications of the TEI (TEI Consortium, 2017b), and these digital-born on-line editions whose creation demands for provide only limited support for integrating RDF data struc- a big investment of time and resources (Eley et al., 2005; tures or references to Linked Data resources. An alternative Nichols and Choudhury, 2017; Laidlaw, 2015). However, which – to our best knowledge – has not previously been regardless of their format, these publications are almost ex- applied in our domain would be to extend conventional clusively stand-alone products. To a greater or lesser de- XML representations with RDFa (Herman et al., 2015), a gree, the reader of a stand-alone edition of Old and Middle formalism that provides specifications to extend XML for- French texts is thus left alone with the attempt to under- mats with arbitrary RDF links. This way of application, stand the text. On its own, an edition is often deprived of however, entails that the TEI vocabulary is to be extended a means that helps to explain the meaning of the vocab- by RDFa attribute definitions within its own namespace. ulary in a broader context: Neither is the vocabulary re- Hence, we strive for a dual objective in this paper: lated to a more comprehensive lexicon of Old and Middle French, nor does a mere glossary reveal the significance of • We describe the transformation of a scholarly text its specific vocabulary within the history of the language. edition (whose original data is encoded with LATEX Only very few digital editions provide a more comprehen- markup) into a high-quality on-line edition in a time- sive access to such information, for example The Online saving manner. Froissart. A Digital Edition of the Chronicles of Jean Frois- sart, Version 1.5, edited by Peter Ainsworth and Godfried • We further evaluate the possibility of using RDFa to Croenen, Sheffield (HRIOnline) 2013, http://www. provide explicit semantics for the links between this hrionline.ac.uk/onlinefroissart/ [accessed on-line publication and the entries of a reference dic- 01-03-2018]: With a specific preference (Global Viewing tionary. Mode ‘DMF’), this on-line edition links its lexemes with the entries of the Dictionnaire du Moyen Français – DMF 1RDF 1.1 Primer, W3C Working Group Note 24 June (Martin, 2015). 2014, https://www.w3.org/TR/rdf11-primer/ (work However, conventional web editions provide a human- in progress) [accessed 01-06-2018]. As a concrete benefit of an RDFa-extended edition of the content we relate the vocabulary of the Grande Chirurgie edited text, these links can be automatically processed by to the respective dictionary entries of the DEAF and to their RDFa parsers such as http://sparql.org [accessed etymological, semantic and encyclopedic discussions. 01-06-2018]. Also, together with other resources pointing to the same dictionary (or, if available, an RDF edition of 3. Original LATEX data the dictionary itself), they can be integrated into larger data The critical text edition of the first treatise of the French bases that combine lexical information from multiple edi- translation, the Anathomy, serves as our corpus data. The tions. text edition is hitherto published as a book (Tittel, 2004); With the interlinking of the lexemes in the text with the en- in the following, we cite this edition with its siglum tries in the dictionary we are able to embed the vocabulary GuiChaulMT.3 We have access to the original format of the within the overall system of the medieval French language data, which comes as a text file with LAT X markup (exam- as it is established by our reference dictionary. This defines E ple 1). This markup has been the basis for a fully auto- their place within the semantic framework given in the dic- mated generation of the text edition (PDF) in 2004 includ- tionary articles. ing a critical apparatus (we used the Edmac package for Our main contribution is to demonstrate the feasibility of typesetting scholarly critical editions4) and an index of the RDFa as an instrument of semantically enriched digital edi- vocabulary (with approx. 1,350 entries). Also, the markup tions within the philologies. In particular, the technological includes the semantic information to create an index of per- support for RDFa excels beyond domain-specific solutions sonal names, i.e., of the authorities of classical and me- favored by the TEI community. Our findings may thus con- dieval medicine that are invoked by Gui de Chauliac to un- tribute to the development of technological bridges between derpin his expertise, e.g., Galen of Pergamon and Avicenna. TEI/XML and (Linguistic) Linked Open Data resources. The typesetting has been executed by a tailor-made LATEX 2. Text and Dictionary class, see Fig.1 and Fig. 2 for the published result. We demonstrate our approach for an edition of a part of the Middle French Grande Chirurgie composed by Gui de Chauliac. The reference dictionary is the compre- hensive etymological dictionary of the Old French lan- guage, the Dictionnaire étymologique de l’ancien français – DEAF (Baldinger, since 1971) which is also relevant for our Middle French text. Its on-line publication, DEAFél, offers dictionary articles for the Old French lexis in open access, see https://deaf-server.adw. 2 uni-heidelberg.de/ [accessed 12-12-2017]. Figure 1: Detail of the text edition, GuiChaulMT p. 78. Gui de Chauliac is one of the most widely known physi- cians and medical authors of the French Middle Ages. His opus, the Latin Chirurgia magna from 1363 AD (Grande Chirurgie in its French translation), is considered the most profound compendium of the medical knowledge of its day. In seven treatises, Gui de Chauliac describes the human anatomy, tumors and cancer, wounds and fractures, the plague, eye, ear, and dental pathology, etc. The work was Figure 2: Detail of the glossary, GuiChaulMT p. 371. translated into French presumably soon after 1363 and the oldest French manuscript transmitting this medical mile- The first step towards our aim was thus the conversion stone dates from the 2nd third of the 15th century. of the original data format into an XML representation. The Grande Chirurgie is of particular relevance for the his- The source material provides excellent preconditions be- tory of the French language as well as for both the history of cause it contains valuable information that we can use for medicine and mentality: On the one hand, the content of the automated processing: The LAT X annotation comprises Grande Chirurgie passes on the medical beliefs propagated E the lemmatization of the vocabulary (i.e., the alignment by the authorities of Classical Antiquity, e.g., the concept of of the individual graphical realization of a lexeme with humoralism by Galen of Pergamon. On the other hand, it is the spelling that is accepted as the Old French standard a valuable witness of a critical re-examination and cautious (Möhren, 2015)), word-category disambiguation (part-of- overcoming of antique explanatory models and movement speech tagging) and also word-sense disambiguation (se- towards a modern understanding of the body.