Towards an Ontopedia for Post-Medieval Hebrew Manuscripts

Hebrew manuscripts are one of the most important sources of Jewish cultural heritage. The largest collection of Hebrew manuscript metadata is offered by the National Library of Israel`s catalog, but most of the manuscripts’ data remains unsearchable and thus undiscovered.

To enable semantic search and large-scale analysis of the manuscript data, we are building a rich event-oriented ontology by targeted information extraction from the catalog on a manuscript`s history, its influence and interactions with other manuscripts, people, places, historical and cultural events. The philosophical approach behind the devised ontology is to view a manuscript as a “living entity”. A sequence of events constitutes a timeline of history against which manuscripts, places, people and their relationships can be placed. The ontological data is linked to similar entities in the existing ontologies in the Semantic Web and becomes part of the open linked data.

Based on the constructed ontology we are building a dynamic web-based framework that will allow scholars to create, enrich and consult an “ontopedia” (ontology-based encyclopedia) of post-medieval Hebrew manuscripts. We focus on the post-medieval period (16th century and later), because these works are under-explored in the research literature.

The developed framework will greatly contribute to the study of the Jewish cultural heritage as it enables posing queries and cross-referencing manuscript-related data from various vocabularies in the Semantic Web. It will also enable an analysis of the effect of time and place on qualitative characteristics and quantitative distribution of the Hebrew manuscripts.