Text Graph Ontology. A Semantic Web approach to represent genetic scholarly editions

Text genetic editions are enjoying sustained popularity in the fields of scholarly editions and literary studies. Representatives of recent research history are the Faust Edition (Bohnenkamp et al. 2016) or the Edition of the works of Arthur Schnitzler (Burch et al. 2016), both of which aim at a complete re-production of the text genesis.

Genetic editions require the reconstruction of complex text genetic processes. Which sequence of tokens forms a specific text state? The extension of the model of the Text Encoding Initiative [TEI] by elements required for genetic editions was the subject of a working group that presented its results in a draft (Burnard et al. 2010). Parts of this draft have been incorporated into the TEI guidelines. With the TEI model complex genetic editions can be realized. However, the underlying structure of the hierarchical graph makes it difficult to reconstruct and compare text gradients, i.e. the evolutionary stages of a text.

The reconstruction of a particular text state can be described as a path through the text. A flexible model of text as graph can support working with genetic text editions beyond strictly hierarchical graphs. The model makes it possible to describe the relations between tokens and their relative de-pendencies in text genesis. In addition the Text-Graph-Ontology enables the indexing of genetic text editions via the Semantic Web. In addition to this ontology, a converter from and to TEI-XML and a web-based viewer and editor will be presented. Semantic Web technologies enable easy annotating and linking the scholarly genetic edition other resources.