=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1364/paper6
|storemode=property
|title=SemanticWeb for BIBLIMOS
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1364/paper6.pdf
|volume=Vol-1364
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/esws/Bouchou-Markhoff15
}}
==SemanticWeb for BIBLIMOS==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1364/paper6.pdf
Semantic Web for BIBLIMOS (position paper)
B ÉATRICE B OUCHOU M ARKHOFF1 , S OPHIE C ARATINI2 , F RANCESCO C OREALE2 ,
M OHAMED L AMINE D IAKIT É3 and A DEL G HAMNIA1
1 Université François Rabelais Tours - Laboratoire d’Informatique LI (EA 6300)
beatrice.bouchou@univ-tours.fr, adel.ghamnia@univ-tours.fr
2 Université François Rabelais Tours - Laboratoire CITERES (UMR 7324)- EMAM team
sophie.caratini@univ-tours.fr, francesco.coreale@univ-tours.fr
3 Université des Sciences, de Technologie et de Médecine - DMI, Nouakchott, Mauritanie
diakite@ustm.mr
Abstract. We present the BIBLIMOS project, which aims to address the Western
Saharan culture and history, by considering both local ancient Arabic manuscripts
and European colonial archives. We describe the project’s context and objectives
before focusing on ancient Mauritanian manuscripts, the content of which covers
many scientific fields. We assess the current state of such ancient manuscripts’
digital processing and we analyse what the semantic web can bring for their use
by scholars, from North and South: the ability for applications to operate jointly
on several distributed and heterogeneous sources of digitized manuscripts and
other kinds of archives, to support collaborative reflection.
Keywords: Ancient Arabic Manuscripts; Data Integration; Semantic Virtual In-
frastructure; Western Saharan Cultural Heritage
1 Introduction
BIBLIMOS is a long standing programme, led by the CITERES laboratory4 , that pro-
poses to collect information, and facilitate the constitution of thematic corpora, from
public and private archives pertaining to the history of the Western Saharan region.
Its first goal was to provide to local students and researchers the ability to study their
history, through a digital remote access to original materials (through images and de-
scriptions), and also the ability to collaborate more easily with foreign teams, on these
materials. Moreover, in the long run, it is also planned to deal with both primary sources
(original material created at the time under study) and secondary sources (material writ-
ten by scholars). In parallel, it is intended to address colonial archives about this geo-
graphical area, from European countries (mainly France and Spain), in order to cross
complementary points of views, and thus, to discover new knowledge.
Involving an international and cross-disciplinary team of researchers in the human-
ities and, more recently, in computer science, BIBLIMOS aims to renew the knowledge
and analysis of Western Sahara’s societies, by making available to researchers from the
North and the South an open and interactive tool for searching and comparing local
4 http://international.univ-tours.fr/
centre-for-cities-territories-environment-and-societies-citeres--283347.
kjsp?RH=INTER
49
archive funds, including the manuscripts of the desert, and European archives related to
these regions. There is also an important multilingual challenge, as we plan to perform
cross-referencing of Arabic, Pulaar, Soninke, Wolof, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Ital-
ian, Dutch, German, English sources relating to the political, military, economic, legal,
social, scientific and religious history of the territories of the Western Saharan region,
from the modern era to the end of the Cold War.
Concerning computer science, the BIBLIMOS programme is just getting started: it
aims to create an e-infrastructure based on a network of information around the history
of the Western Sahara. This open tool will offer (i) an access to sets of archival sources
and original manuscripts, (ii) a guide to navigate this knowledge network, (iii) an auto-
matic registration of new sources and (iv) new tools for knowledge creation and visual-
izations. It will also be interfaced with various useful existing applications for research,
such as electronic publishing platforms, collaborative editing tools, bibliography man-
agement tools, etc. To achieve this goal, three lines of work have been initiated. First,
to instigate, assist and sustain the creation of quality digital resources from the origi-
nal sources, second, to develop partnerships with providers of already existing digital
resources, and third, to incrementally build the target distributed e-infrastructure, in-
cluding a web portal as mediator, relying on semantic web resources and technologies.
In the first line of work, BIBLIMOS stakeholders in Social Sciences and Human-
ities (SSH) are engaged in actions aimed at discovering new local sources and con-
vincing their owners to join the programme. Concerning the second line of work, today
manuscript sources concealed in the Western Sahara are already partly inventoried, and
many European archive funds are now available to the public. As shown in Table 1, on
the one hand, online digitized full-text manuscripts exist, duly indexed and catalogued,
and on the other hand, institutions or associations offer to collaborate in order to index
digitized materials from many sources (cf. last lines in Table 1). Clearly the Web, that
provides information exploitable by humans, well supports all those very useful initia-
tives. However, the query, the analysis, the combination and the overlapping of these
multiple funds, still represents a major challenge for every interested person. This paper
is dedicated to the third line of work in the BIBLIMOS programme, which addresses the
field of the automatic data-processing of such sources, in order to better assist humans
in these tasks. This is a field in which almost everything has to be designed and built.
The Semantic Web, i.e., the web knowledge exploitable automatically by computers, is
the way to cope with these challenges, as we argue in Section 3, after having presented
the state of the art of digital processing of Ancient Arabic Manuscripts in Section 2.
2 Digital processing of Mauritanian Ancient Arabic Manuscripts
2.1 Mauritanian Ancient Arabic Manuscripts
We focus on Mauritania’s manuscripts because Sophie Caratini, the instigator of the
BIBLIMOS programme, is an anthropologist specialist of Mauritania and she built
strong collaborations with scholars in Nouakchott, in particular through the IMRS5 .
5 Institut Mauritanien de la Recherche Scientifique, see http://www.imrs.mr/spip.php?
page=sommaire_fr
50
Site Description
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
http: Online catalogue, references about 22500
//www.westafricanmanuscripts.org/ manuscripts from eleven different collections,
including Northwestern Univ.
Northwestern University, Chicago. Online
http://digital.library.northwestern.
catalogue, entries from four separate
edu/arbmss/index.html
collections.
Library of Congress. Online catalogue, with
http://memory.loc.gov/intldl/
access to images of 32 manuscripts from
malihtml/malihome.html
Timbuktu, Mali.
French National Library (BnF). Online
http://gallica.bnf.fr/
access to 35 manuscripts from Timbuktu, Mali.
University of Cape Town. Tombouctou
http://www.tombouctoumanuscripts.org Manuscripts Project; access to primary sources
upon registration.
Universities of Freiburg and Tübingen
(Germany). Online images of approx. 2.500
http://omar.ub.uni-freiburg.de/
Arabic manuscripts (134.000 images) from
Mauritania, with bibliographical metadata.
Bibliotheca Alexandrina (Egypt). Online
collection of Arabic manuscripts related to
http://wamcp.bibalex.org/
classical medicine, around 1000 books and
fragments.
Qatar Digital Library (with the British
Library). Archives, maps, manuscripts, sound
http://www.qdl.qa/en
recordings, photographs with explanatory
notes and links, in both English and Arabic.
IMRS (Mauritanian Islamic Republic).
makrim.org Catalog of Mauritanian manuscripts, in both
French and Arabic.
http://www.islamicmanuscript.org/ The Islamic Manuscript Association
extresources/manuscriptcatalogues. (Cambridge, stakeholders from 25 countries).
aspx List of Islamic manuscripts catalogues.
Open Library (world wide open access
http://openlibrary.org/ project). List of resources on Arabic
manuscripts (catalogues, books, etc.).
The Internet Archive (USA non profit
http://www.archive.org/ association). A search on Arabic manuscripts
gives some digitized books.
Table 1: Web sites about Western Saharan, or more generally, Arabic manuscripts.
51
Mauritania is known [. . . ] for its enormously rich heritage of Arab manuscripts, many
brought from the Arab East by pilgrims returning from Makkah, some recopied from
those imported sources by students in the Qur’an schools [. . . ], and others composed
by Mauritania’s own jurists, poets and historians6 [16]. According to researchers, some
Mauritanian manuscripts were written as early as in the 10th century, and their forms
and subjects are very diverse, including law, science and religion. To have access to
this legacy, the first step is to build up a precise survey of all manuscript repositories in
existence in the territories of the Western Saharan region. This has been the goal of long
term projects: for instance, the West African Arabic Manuscripts Database Project, from
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, started in 1987, provides a catalogue
(first line of Table 1) that references more than two thousand manuscripts. Currently, it
references eleven collections, which still is far from representing the actual reality of
family libraries. This is one of the web resources we plan to exploit in the BIBLIMOS
programme, in parallel of completing the repositories survey work performed by the
SSH teams. Several other websites provide information on Western Saharan or, more
generally, on Arabic manuscripts: the list presented in Table 1 shows that there is al-
ready a lot of knowledge available on the web, but this knowledge still is exploitable
only through human labour.
2.2 Digital Processing of Ancient Arabic Manuscripts
Concerning manuscripts, many different descriptions may be stored in computer memo-
ries: (i) seeing the manuscript as an archaeological object, i.e. starting from its external
aspect, a set of features may be evaluated, for instance the material it is made with,
the colour of ink, etc. This is called codicology [4] and a well-established vocabulary
for such a set of descriptors is provided by the IRHT7 ; (ii) a numerical image of the
manuscript can be taken; (iii) a transcription of the manuscript’s textual content can be
created, either manually or automatically from its numerical image (with OCR tools);
(iv) both the image and the transcription may be annotated, this is the case for many Eu-
ropean manuscripts, whose textual contents are encoded using the TEI standard; (v) the
manuscript can be catalogued, i.e. classified and described by librarians or archivists,
so it could be found again among collections: this supposes to define and identify de-
scriptors, including the location, and some general information about the content.
For each of these descriptions, active research is conducted and, in some cases, they
converge to well established standards. Specifically for ancient Arabic manuscripts, in
[15] the authors present the problem of cataloguing, assessing the difficulties involved
in identifying the metadata used by different schools (those dealing with specimen and
those addressing whole volumes). The solution proposed for enhancing interoperability
is to rely on the DCMI8 vocabulary. The TEI9 , aimed at helping libraries, publishers,
museums and universities to encode texts in order to facilitate information retrieval from
6 http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/200306/mauritania.s.manuscripts.htm
7 Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire de Textes, see http://codicologia.irht.cnrs.fr
8 World widely used, simple and generic, digitized resources’ description, see http://
dublincore.org/
9 Text Encoding Initiative: http://www.tei-c.org/index.xml
52
textual contents, is another important medium for interoperability [14]. Nevertheless we
cannot hope to use it in the short term because for now the only way to get transcriptions
of Mauritanian manuscripts is to manually enter the text. Indeed, automatic character
recognition algorithms hardly apply to these kinds of manuscripts, written with Arabic
graphemes but very often actually in many other languages (e.g. Pulaar, Wolof, etc.).
In [1], the authors recall the existing difficulties for applying OCR to ancient Arabic
manuscripts and, although recent advances are reported in [3] and [11], they need to
be further developed. Manuscript image analysis is not reduced to OCR: for instance,
word spotting may be a useful alternative to character recognition. This is why several
works propose to build ontological descriptions (or sets of metadata) of graphical image
features, in order to index and retrieve manuscripts’ digital images on this descriptive
basis [7, 6]. But to the best of our knowledge, such proposals have never been applied
to ancient Arabic manuscripts.
When it comes to ontological representation of ancient manuscripts, the work de-
scribed in [10], about the SAWS10 project (Sharing Ancient WisdomS), is clearly an
example of what we target in the BIBLIMOS framework. It deals with collections of
moral and social advice and/or philosophical ideas from Greek and Arab wisdom liter-
atures. Many of the concerned manuscripts have been transcribed and annotated using
TEI, and an extension of the FRBRoo ontology [9] has been developed to describe
the transmission of information (from one copyist to another and from one language
to another). The authors extract the relationships defined in the ontology from the TEI
annotations, to generate a conceptual network expressed in RDF11 . This network al-
lows researchers to explore links between the different documents’ contents. This is an
example of how semantic web technologies contribute to the building of new means
of knowledge, by opening up and linking various sources for research which would
otherwise remain isolated and unused.
3 Semantic Web Architecture for BIBLIMOS
For humans, carrying out some scientific work by using the resources listed in Table 1
is still difficult, as there are no means to perform cross-references, comparisons, or to
analyse the different points of view they provide, etc. Regarding BIBLIMOS’ aims,
other kinds of sources than manuscripts (e.g. European archives) should also be ex-
ploited, which increases again these difficulties. Fortunately, while the web allowed
sources’ owners (or depositaries) to publish their resources through websites, the se-
mantic web now supports the development of softwares that help humans to cope with
these difficulties. Indeed, the semantic web is a network of semantic representations of
web-published information that relies on the same technical principles as the websites’
network, but allows programs to operate on data at this semantic level. Main semantic
web concepts are (i) web ontologies and (ii) linked (open) data; they provide a global
space of interoperability, thus they are important components for BIBLIMOS’ aims.
Figure 1 illustrates the intended general architecture for the BIBLIMOS programme.
The novelties brought by the semantic web obviously start at the DATA level: to benefit
10 http://www.ancientwisdoms.ac.uk/
11 Data model standard: http://www.w3.org/RDF/
53
from these novelties, beyond all the work that has to be done to obtain results presented
in the previous section, digital sources should also be pushed up to the semantic level.
To this aim, the sources’ concepts and their relationships must be specified, from the
bottom-up (starting from the source contents), top-down (from already well defined
consensual ontologies), or both. The source’s content should be related to this concep-
tual level, which may be done by using tools called Mapping Frameworks in Figure 1.
Some of those tools propose to export the source data into a set of RDF triples (the stan-
dard data warehouse approach in data integration systems), and some of them propose
to access data through the conceptual level, based on the ontology-based data access
(OBDA) principles [5] (the mediation approach, which is provided by, e.g., ontop12 ).
Whatever the chosen approach, the source’s content is then searchable at the semantic
level, with SPARQL. Those contents may be combined using reference thesauri and
ontologies.
WEB PORTALS
Visualisations Navigations
Preferences Interactive Analysis
Collaborations Virtual Res. Inf.
QUERIES
Information Retrieval Entity Linking
Data Mining Inferences
Integration Mediation Aggregation
SPARQL queriable THESAURUS
REFERENCE SOURCES
ONTOLOGIES
MAPPING
CONCEPTS FRAMEWORKS
describing SOURCES SOURCES
annotations images databases
Fig. 1: Global BIBLIMOS’ Virtual Infrastructure.
Querying the semantic web through its linked data sets is still in its infancy. Pub-
lic well-established reference knowledge resources play the important role of hubs in
this linked data network. The most visible are resources of facts, e.g. DBpedia, but at
the conceptual level, reference domain ontologies also act as fundamental integration
means. This is the case for CIDOC CRM [13] for cultural heritage, with its extension
12 http://ontop.inf.unibz.it/
54
FRBRoo for libraries. These reference domain ontologies are the product of a long, in-
ternational collaborative work, reflecting a consensus among the domain experts. These
distributed and collaborative dimensions of the web are naturally inherited by the se-
mantic web. In the context of BIBLIMOS, this is extremely powerful because these
two features mirror the local structural organization of the Mauritanian family libraries,
open to communities but distributed in the country rather than centralized in only one
authoritative place.
The semantic web resources also promote multilingualism, particularly in vocab-
ulary resources such as thesaurus, as evidenced by multilingual ones, e.g. VIAF13 or
RAMEAU14 , the French national library thesaurus now accessible on the semantic web
(in SKOS), which is fully interlinked with a German (SWD) and an American (LCSH)
thesaurus (thanks to the Multilingual ACcess to Subjects project).
Above the DATA layer is the LOGIC layer, in which all the well-known successful
inventions in the field of data operation (some of which are listed in Figure 1) may be
revisited to take into account the semantic dimension of data. A corner stone for most
of them is to access multiple sources conjointly, which supposes interoperability: one
of the solutions provided by the semantic web is to align the local lightweight ontolo-
gies that describe the sources’ content to the reference ontologies, allowing mediator
systems to aggregate local data sets, for instance following the principles described
in [12, 2]. Very active researches are conducted in the semantic web community to de-
velop this LOGIC level, based on efforts to produce a strong semantic data layer. Lastly
comes the PRESENTATION layer, whose innovative potential is also greatly boosted
by the possibilities issued from the semantic web.
4 Conclusion
We first drew a state of the art concerning the ways ancient Arabic manuscripts are pro-
cessed and made available to the public nowadays, considering that the picture is not so
different in the area of European archives (except that OCR tools are more usable). Once
digitized, sources must be pushed up to the semantic level, for the query, the analysis,
the combination and the intersection of these multiple funds to be supported by auto-
matic data-processing of sources. We presented the semantic-web Virtual Infrastructure
designed to cope with these challenges within the BIBLIMOS programme.
We are aware that BIBLIMOS is a very ambitious programme - we are not aware
of the existence of a similar enterprise anywhere else - as semantic web applications
in this field are just beginning to emerge. For now, agreements are signed between our
universities (Tours and Nouakchott), both in the computer science side and the social
science side.AFD15 currently funds a training campaign for librarians of the IMRS16
on cataloguing documents, and the Mauritanian government is going to support all the
needed local actions. Concerning the semantic web level, we are building an ontology
13 Virtual International name Authority File: http://viaf.org/
14 http://data.bnf.fr/en/semanticweb
15 Agence Française de Développement: http://www.afd.fr/lang/en/home
16 Institut Mauritanien de recherches scientifiques: http://www.imrs.mr/spip.php?page=
sommaire_fr
55
for the IMRS’ manuscripts [8], a part of which is already digitized, and we plan to
work on designing and building an annotation tool based on this ontology. In order to
include the European side (archives on these countries), we are thinking about a MSC
Action (deadline in january, 2016). The campaign of partnerships with already existing
materials is still to be done, as we must first build the semantic web tools that we should
propose to them.
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