Inscriptions, Hieroglyphs, Linguistics… and Beyond! The Corpus of Classic Mayan as an Ontological Information Resource

The project ‘Text Database and Dictionary of Classic Mayan’ compiles the hieroglyphic texts written by the ancient Maya in a machine-readable corpus. The corpus is represented as separate information resources, each described by an ontological model representing the specific semantics and complexities of the material. Using different formats (RDF, XML) and standards (CIDOC-CRM, TEI-P5), the inscriptions are encoded in a multi-level corpus: (1) a TEI-all conform schema defining values and rules for the encoding of the text’s topological and structural features, (2) a ‘Sign Catalogue’ for the classification of Maya hieroglyphs, and (3) the tool ‘ALMAH’ for linguistic analyses. Maya writing is not yet fully deciphered, not all signs are known, and we still deal with competing reading hypotheses and a missing Unicode character set. To represent the script, we use stand-off markup to enable an interlinked structure between distributed sources: The TEI encoding serves as central data source, embedding other information. The project will encode approximately 10,000 texts.  To support the workflow, we developed a parser that creates the according TEI/XML structure out of a project-specific sign number transliteration.