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{{Paper
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|storemode=property
|title=Biblissima's Prototype on Medieval Manuscript Illuminations and their Context
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1364/paper5.pdf
|volume=Vol-1364
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/esws/GehrkeFCM15
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==Biblissima's Prototype on Medieval Manuscript Illuminations and their Context==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1364/paper5.pdf
Biblissima’s Prototype on Medieval Manuscript
Illuminations and their Context
Stefanie Gehrke, Eduard Frunzeanu, Pauline Charbonnier, and Marie Muffat
Equipex Biblissima, Campus Condorcet, Paris, France
{stefanie.gehrke,eduard.frunzeanu,pauline.charbonnier,marie.muffat}@
biblissima-condorcet.fr
http://www.biblissima-condorcet.fr
Abstract. Biblissima is an online digital library, which provides easy
and coordinated access to a huge and complex mass of documentation
on manuscripts and early printed books, the texts contained therein,
their circulation and their readers, from the 8th to 18th centuries. This
workshop presentation will give an overview of the steps followed and
decisions made along the way to releasing a first prototype of the Biblis-
sima portal: from mapping data to a common ontology, via the establish-
ment of a thesaurus, to the technical development of a single interface
and a common triple store for data deriving from different iconographic
databases on medieval manuscripts.
Keywords: cidoc crm · frbroo · medieval manuscript · illumination · in-
teroperability · descriptors · thesaurus · historical place names · semantic
web · linked data · library · Middle Ages · Humanism · Renaissance
1 Objectives of the Biblissima Observatory
Biblissima - Bibliotheca bibliothecarum novissima - is an observatory for the
written cultural heritage of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, developed
through the French government programme Équipements d’excellence, part of
the Investissements d’avenir [1]. The observatory focusses on documents written
in the main languages of culture in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Arabic,
French, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, etc.) and contributes to a better understanding
of the circulation of texts, the evolution of libraries and the transmission of
knowledge in Europe from the 8th to the 18th century.
In addition to its contributions to research, Biblissima plays an important
role in disseminating knowledge about the written cultural heritage of the Middle
Ages and the Renaissance to the widest possible audience.
Led by the Campus Condorcet, the Biblissima project brings together eight
French partner institutions in the fields of research, teaching and cultural her-
itage, including the BnF (National Library of France) and the IRHT (Institut
de recherche et d’histoire des textes).
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2 Stefanie Gehrke, Eduard Frunzeanu, Pauline Charbonnier, and Marie Muffat
The two main components of the observatory are a cluster of the project’s
data on manuscripts and early printed books currently found in as many as 40
databases in different formats and with different research interests (including
illuminated manuscripts, history of the transmission of texts and history of col-
lections) and a digital image repository. The databases will be interconnected
using semantic web technologies and linked to a platform for digital editions and
to the project’s digital image repository.
1.1 Semantic Web Solutions for Historical Data
In order to handle the heterogeneity of the database formats (MySQL, EAD,
TEI P5, UNIMARC, etc.) and the variety of Biblissima’s data (manuscript cat-
aloguing databases, textual editions, iconographic databases) we have chosen
to use the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (Comité International pour la
Documentation Conceptual Reference Model [2]) and FRBRoo (Functional Re-
quirements for Bibliographic Records object oriented [3]) as framework for a
project-specific extension of those ontologies that facilitates the internal map-
ping to a single common model and allows the partners to expose their data in
RDF compliant to a globally established standard.
CIDOC CRM is an accepted ISO standard (ISO 21127). As an event-centric
ontology it covers different phenomena in space and time like provenance, copy-
ing of texts, creation of works and expressions, as well as the production of
information carriers and attribute assignments. As CIDOC CRM and FRBRoo
(which combines the CIDOC CRM approach with the common vocabulary for
the transmission of works (WEMI) that is provided by the FRBR model) are
generic models for the museum and library domains, it was decided to define
a few more specific classes and properties related to manuscripts, early printed
books and illuminations. For example, within the scope of the Biblissima project
a medieval manuscript is an instance of the class bibma:Manuscript, which is a
subclass of frbroo:F4 Manifestation Singleton (“This class comprises phys-
ical objects that each carry an instance of F2 Expression, and that were pro-
duced as unique objects, with no siblings intended in the course of their produc-
tion”). An instance of a bibma:Manuscript might be composed of several parts
(bibma:Component) and might carry both text and illustrations.
As regards the illustrations, there are several possible modelling solutions
in CIDOC CRM, such as E38 Image (“This class comprises distributions of
form, tone and colour that may be found on surfaces such as photos, paintings,
prints and sculptures or directly on electronic media”) or its subclass E36 Visual
Item (“This class comprises the intellectual or conceptual aspects of recognisable
marks and images”). These solutions have been adopted both for book illustra-
tions by the “Illustrations of Goethe’s Faust” project [4] and for maps by the
“Carte de la nouvelle frontire Turco-Grecque” project [5]. In order to model the
illumination genre, we decided instead to define an illumination as an instance of
a class called bibma:Illumination, which is a subclass of E26 Physical Feature
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Biblissima’s Prototype on Medieval Manuscripts 3
(‘This class comprises identifiable features that are physically attached in an in-
tegral way to particular physical objects”). The following RDF triple expresses
this relationship.
:c a bibma:Component .
:i a bibma:Illumination .
:c crm:P56 bears feature :i .
This is a shortcut for the fully developed path:
:folio a crm:E53 Place .
:c a bibma:Component ;
crm:P59 has section :folio .
:i a bibma:Illumination ;
crm:P53 has former or current location :folio .
Instances of E53 Place are a folio or a particular zone on a folio, for example.
The ontology interacts with a thesaurus of technical terms used in medieval
studies (codicology, palaeography, iconography etc.) and descriptors used for
indexing medieval illuminations in the project’s databases. The data is struc-
tured in a thesaurus compliant with the international standard for thesauri and
interoperability with other vocabularies (ISO 25964). The different lexical and
semantic relationships that can be defined between the descriptors will have an
intrinsic (semantic) role, in that they will help to show the relationships of hy-
ponymy or synonymy, as well as an extrinsic (technical) function for the search
engine. In addition, the project’s data on people, corporate bodies, places and
titles are aligned with existing authority files and linked data repositories, such
as Rameau, VIAF, and GeoNames.
1.2 The Historical Dimension of Biblissima’s Data
The majority of Biblissima’s databases contain descriptive and structural meta-
data for medieval manuscripts and early printed books, issued from the cata-
loguing of these documents or scientific research, but the project also includes
digital editions in TEI P5 of library inventories and texts and records on illumi-
nations. Metadata like the date of creation and place of origin of a manuscript
and its illuminations, the identification of the scribe, translator or commentator
of the copied text, former owners (people and corporate bodies) of a manuscript
throughout the centuries and lists of books kept in libraries at a given moment
in time can be used to study the history of the texts and manuscripts, as well
as reading and collecting practices.
In order to develop the portal step by step we have chosen to begin by creating
a unified access point to two iconographic databases.
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4 Stefanie Gehrke, Eduard Frunzeanu, Pauline Charbonnier, and Marie Muffat
2 Objectives of the Biblissima Prototype
Using Semantic Web technologies, the Biblissima prototype aims to demonstrate
the potential of the available metadata produced by the Biblissima project. It
was developed using open source solutions and all the data is publicly available
under an open licence in order to facilitate reuse.
The prototype is built on a subset of two iconographic databases: Mandragore
[6], the database of the Department of Manuscripts of the National Library of
France (BnF) and Initiale [7], the database of the IRHT.
It provides federated access to a subset of data present in the two databases,
such as illumination related data: caption, descriptor, folio carrying the illumi-
nation, illumination record, digital surrogate of the illumination, artist, context
of the illumination (author and title of the textual work per artistic unit), date
of origin and place of origin. The data set also contains manuscript related
data such as shelfmark, common name, grouping, repository, digital surrogate,
manuscript record.
The subset is limited, in the case of both databases, to records on illumina-
tions indexed with at least one geographical descriptor, which equates to almost
5 000 descriptors for approximately 20 000 illuminations.
A SPARQL endpoint and a federated search engine make it possible to search
all the data in the cluster. Users can search by descriptor, artist, date of origin,
place of origin, author or work title, and can refine their search with a series of
facet filters. The results are displayed in a user-friendly manner by grouping them
in lists. Pages about manuscripts, their units and illuminations include frames
that display the corresponding digital surrogate using IIIF manifests [8], relat-
ing text and images. Other visualisation features are available to the user, such
as timelines and maps. The data from Initiale and Mandragore are augmented
with data on the digital surrogates of illuminations in their context, extracted
from other manuscript catalogues (Medium [9] - the IRHT manuscript reposi-
tory, Gallica - the digital library of the BnF, and BnF archives et manuscrits
[10] - the catalogue of the Department of Manuscripts of the National Library
of France). Each illumination record in the prototype links back to the origi-
nal record from one of the two databases as well as to the full digitisation of
the manuscript when available. The search capabilities currently do not include
manuscript genealogies. This can be achieved by including more databases and
classes like bibma:Type of Use Manuscript and bibma:Source in the future,
when implementing solutions deriving from lessons learned about texts and their
transmission.
Both databases have been used to index manuscript illuminations for the
last 25 years and different systems were chosen for structuring the descriptors.
A polyhierarchical classification of Biblissima’s thesaurus may make it possible
to retain the original descriptor classifications while reordering them in a new
systematisation. However, these classifications do not reflect the medieval prac-
tices of organising knowledge. The identification of the iconographic elements is
46
Biblissima’s Prototype on Medieval Manuscripts 5
sometimes based on internal information such as heading titles, chapter titles,
inscriptions or notes present in the manuscript; in the absence of this kind of
information, identification is dependent on the scholar’s culture, especially in the
case of living things and artefacts. This means that when using these descriptors
to study medieval illuminations, we must keep in mind that their identification
has a disparate chronological and cultural origin. Another feature of the indexing
practices specific to these databases is that the data does not provide co-textual
information, and the contextual information is not always available. This makes
quite difficult to trace the diachronic evolution of the meaning of a word and of
its iconographic representation.
The technical solutions adopted by Biblissima open new avenues and yield
new ways of searching through data that could contribute to the analysis of
iconographic representations. On the basis of the geographic descriptors, one
could attempt to answer several questions regarding the status of cities in artistic
imagery and define the notion of the city through iconographic choices: what are
the criteria which confer an urban identity to a community and what makes the
difference between an urban and a rural environment? From what point in time
do cities begin to be represented and what cities are the most represented over
the centuries? How could one explain the cases of single occurrence? Could one
analyse the anachronistic representations of places, be they cities or battlefields?
What are the most common descriptors associated with toponyms?
3 Conclusion
The semantic web solutions that Biblissima has chosen could be adapted in order
to provide answers to other kinds of research topics. As such, Biblissima’s poly-
hierarchical thesaurus makes it possible to establish new classifications of the
descriptors that already exist in the databases and to recreate a medieval taxon-
omy of living species as it was conceived by an encyclopedist or a physician, for
example. One might also connect the thesaurus to the digital edition of exeget-
ical texts such as the biblical Glossa [11], one of Biblissima’s partner projects,
and try to study the semantic relations between the four senses of the Scrip-
ture (historical, allegorical, tropological and anagogical) and the iconographic
representation of the biblical words and scenes, for example.
By adopting common standards for the ontology and for the thesaurus, Bib-
lissima’s data might also be aggregated with and used by other semantic web
projects in the future.
References
1. Investissements d’avenir (CGI), ANR-11-EQPX-0007 http://
investissement-avenir.gouvernement.fr
2. CIDOC CRM 6.0, http://cidoc-crm.org/docs/cidoc_crm_version_6.0.pdf
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6 Stefanie Gehrke, Eduard Frunzeanu, Pauline Charbonnier, and Marie Muffat
3. FRBRoo 2.2, http://www.ifla.org/files/assets/cataloguing/frbr/frbroo_
v2.2.pdf
4. Abrami, G., Freiberg, M., Warner, P.: Managing and Annotating Historical Multi-
modal Corpora with the eHumanities Desktop - An outline of the current state of
the LOEWE project Illustrations of Goethe’s Faust. In: Historical Corpora, pp. 353
– 363. Narr Francke Attempto, Tübingen (2015)
5. Gkadolou, E., Stefanakis, E.: A formal ontology for historical maps, http://galaxy.
hua.gr/~heraclitus/images/gkadolou/3\_Gkadolou\_ICA.pdf (2013)
6. Mandragore, http://mandragore.bnf.fr
7. Initiale, http://initiale.irht.cnrs.fr/accueil/index.php
8. IIIF, http://iiif.io/
9. Medium, http://medium.irht.cnrs.fr/
10. BnF, Archives et Manuscrits, http://archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr
11. Biblical Glossa, http://www.glossae.net/
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