Citations and annotations in classics: old problems and new perspectives

Abstract

Annotations played a major role in Classics since the very beginning of the discipline. Some of the first attested examples of philological work, the so-called scholia, were in fact marginalia, namely comments written at the margins of a text. Over the centuries this kind of scholarship evolved until it became a genre on its own, the classical commentary, thus moving away from the text with the result that philologists had to devise a solution to linking together the commented and the commenting text. The solution to this problem is the system of canonical citations, a special kind of bibliographic references that are at the same time very precise and highly interoperable. In this paper we present HuCit, an ontology that models in depth the semantics of canonical citations. We discuss how it can be used to a) support the automatic extraction of canonical citations from texts and b) to publish them in machine-readable format on the Semantic Web. Finally, we describe how HuCit's machine-generated citation data can also be expressed as annotations by using the Open Annotation Collaboration (OAC) ontology, to the aim of increasing reuse and semantic interoperability.