This publication describes PaleOrdia, a web application developed to visualize (cuneiform) paleographic sign variants in Wikidata and the data model developed in Wikidata to represent paleography. Modeling paleographic sign variants of (ancient) scripts in linked open data is a relatively new development. It will enable better descriptions of digital scholarly editions with paleographic annotations supported by established web annotation data model vocabularies. As a use case for showcasing the capabilities of PaleOrdia, the cuneiform annotation tool Cuneur is presented as one way to harness the paleographiclinked open data for digital scholarly editions.
Describing the paleography of inscriptions on cultural heritage objects is a common task in
many digital scholarly editions [
The cuneiform script is one of the earliest writing systems used in Ancient Mesopotamia as the script for many languages such as Sumerian, Akkadian, and Hittite. Throughout its existence, for 3000 years, cuneiform signs have considerably evolved and been simplified. They usually depict a transformation from a pictograph to increasingly simplified cuneiform wedge configurations—the basis of all known cuneiform signs. Figure 1 shows the evolution of cuneiform signs throughout space and time. For example, the cuneiform sign SAG for head starts as a pictograph of a head in the Late Uruk period and is subsequently simplified. Starting from the Early Dynastic period, cuneiform signs are comprised of cuneiform wedges to represent cuneiform signs. Cuneiform wedges as atomic components of every cuneiform sign allow for a more simple and formalized drawing of the grapheme and change in composition and positioning of the cuneiform wedges in the subsequent centuries.
This section briefly introduces terminology that may be used to describe paleographic sign variants.
Definition 1.
Character A unit of information that often corresponds to a grapheme or a symbol.
The definition of a character can be seen as equivalent to something that can be represented by a Unicode codepoint. In contrast, a Unicode code point stands for a variety of shapes of the same grapheme, e.g., may be depicted by diferent fonts, which may visualize a Unicode codepoint to the user.
Definition 2. Sign A cuneiform sign is a set of shapes/graphemes of cuneiform wedge configurations across time and space that have been classified under a common identifier.
A sign identifier for a cuneiform sign may be represented in diferent ways. The cuneiform research community defines so-called sign names for cuneiform signs, often derived from the most common reading of the sign in the Sumerian language. Many, but not all, sign names are equivalent to a Unicode codepoint. Figure 1 shows the three sign names SAG, NINDA and GU7, which each have a corresponding Unicode codepoint in the Unicode standard. However, there are several sign names that have no Unicode codepoint attested at the time of writing. Most cuneiform signs without a Unicode codepoint are combinations of already existing cuneiform signs.
Definition 3. Sign Variant A sign variant is a class of representations of a cuneiform sign that has been attested in time and space.
A sign variant is a set of distinct configurations of cuneiform wedges that have been classified by a sign name and have been assigned a time period and/or location. Figure 2 shows a set of cuneiform signs that difer in the number of wedges, their positioning, and the shapes of the cuneiform wedges used to build the signs. The shapes of the individual cuneiform wedges shown in Figure 2 difer slightly due to font variations and due to semantic expressions font creators might want to convey. For example, a filled wedge head of a cuneiform sign might hint at the sign variant being created on a stone surface vs. on a clay surface.
Definition 4. Stylistic Sign Variant A stylistic sign variant is a stylistic change of a sign variant that does not constitute a change of its characteristic elements.
However, in reality, subtle changes in writing on the cuneiform clay tablet, expressed, for example, in the length of individual strokes, the angle of individual strokes in certain cuneiform sign variants, or the pointiness of wedge heads, might reveal the style of a particular writer or even writing school. The aforementioned changes would typically be part of a stylistic sign variant that hints at a specific author of cuneiform texts.
Various approaches have been researched in the past to capture the essence of cuneiform sign
variants. Diferent encodings such as [
The first ideas of modeling paleography with linked open data technologies emerged in the
digital humanities community in 2020. [
In the previous sections, foundations for modeling paleographic-linked open data were defined. This section explains how Wikidata can be used to represent paleographic features such as cuneiform signs. Many cuneiform signs have been described in the Unicode standard, which Wikidata adopts as QIDs. Hence, a starting point for a paleographic description are the Unicode signs themselves. However, coverage of the Unicode codepoints for cuneiform signs would not be suficient. Cuneiform signs may appear as ligatures, represented as more than one Unicode codepoint, or cuneiform signs may not occur suficiently often to be considered for addition to the Unicode standard. These signs will be added as new items to Wikidata and referenced in respective literature. Figure 3 shows the data model for paleographic data adopted in Wikidata. The data model relates cuneiform signs to their paleographic sign variants, which are classified by time periods and - if applicable - encodings for their description. Lexicographical data within Wikidata, such as the Sumerian word "a" (water) (L228723) may link to paleographic sign variants used within their respective forms. In this way, scholars can express not only that a Lexeme has been occurring in a specific time period, at a specific place, and in a specific text source but also in which paleographic shape the Lexeme form has been attested. As shown in fig:cuneiformsignhalcompoenents, many cuneiform signs consist of other cuneiform signs. These can be modeled using Wikidata has parts (wdt:P527) relations. Finally, the semantics of the original pictographs can be captured as their meanings in Wikidata using the depicts (wdt:P180) relation. This leads to the capture of cuneiform sign meanings not only on the level of the grapheme but also on a semantic level.
PaleOrdia1 is a fork of the tool Ordia [
• PaleOrdia combines the view of Wikidata Lexemes with Wikidata Paleography data PaleOrdia ofers the following functionalities to highlight cuneiform paleographic data: • Listing of cuneiform sign variants by time period and reference work • Identification of cuneiform signs which have not been included into Unicode 2 • Listing of cuneiform signs by type (compound3 and allograph signs4) • Representation of cuneiform sign etymology and compounds
PaleoOrdia allows users to view information about a cuneiform sign, including the reference works and reference databases in which it is attested, its readings (phonetic values), its classification as a compound sign, allograph, or cuneiform sign, and whether a single Unicode codepoint represents it. Besides metadata such as the attestations of a cuneiform sign in sign lists and on actual cuneiform tablet texts, each PaleOrdia page for a cuneiform sign also lists the diferent sign variants 5 the sign has been attested with, as shown in Figure 4 Compound signs may be shown per cuneiform sign and cuneiform sign variant. Figure 56 shows compound signs containing the cuneiform sign HAL in a sign variant common in the Old Babylonian and 2https://situx.github.io/paleordia/no_unicode/?q=Q401&qLabel=cuneiform&qb=Q401 3https://situx.github.io/paleordia/compoundsigns/?q=Q401&qLabel=cuneiform&qb=Q401 4https://situx.github.io/paleordia/allographs/?q=Q401&qLabel=cuneiform&qb=Q401 5https://situx.github.io/paleordia/c/?q=Q87554995&qLabel=%F0%92%80%80 6https://situx.github.io/paleordia/cf/?q=Q120671708&qLabel=Cuneiform%20Sign%20Variant%20HAL% 20(Akkadian) Akkadian periods. Similar visualizations exist for other time periods, and a generic visualization based on Unicode codepoints is generated for the Unicode sign itself. Finally, users can list the Lexemes in which the Unicode codepoint appears and the attested readings for a cuneiform sign, which may be used to search for the sign and the sign variants in a research context. In essence, PaleOrdia hereby acts as the view on a linked data-based paleographic sign registry that can be extended collaboratively and provides a basis for discussion by scholars.
A digital edition of cuneiform tablets encompasses a variety of steps by a scholar but usually requires the following components: 1. A transliteration of the written contents of the cuneiform tablet’s sides into the Latin alphabet 2. The annotation of interesting text passages 3. The annotation of interesting features on image media depicting the cuneiform tablet (e.g., broken parts, cuneiform signs, or seal impressions) 7https://fcgl.gitlab.io/annotator-showcase/ and with URIs, which allow for the reusage of paleographic sign variants across the boundaries of a single cuneiform digital edition.
This publication introduced the application of a paleographic-linked open data model in Wikidata. The model was tested using the cuneiform script as an example use case and has been used to describe actual cuneiform sign variants found on images and renderings of cuneiform tablet surfaces. The tool PaleOrdia gives an overview and can manage the entered cuneiform sign variants using only a static homepage on Github. This allows cuneiform scholars to get an overview of available cuneiform signs, allows them to compare these sign variants to their ifndings on the cuneiform clay tablets, and create a linked open data graph of image annotations that are linked to this sign variant registry, which has therefore emerged within Wikidata. The results of such annotations can not only prove valuable for the cuneiform scholar community but may also provide the basis and training data for a variety of machine-assisted classification methods. Finally, this case study based on the cuneiform script might inspire the modeling of sign variants of other scripts in Wikidata, contributing to an interconnected linked open data cloud for paleography.
Future work should enhance the paleographic linked open data cloud with metrics that allow
the calculation of the similarity of diferent graphemes in the linked open data cloud either by
semantic similarity, by image similarity metrics, or by metrics built from encodings which allow
the expression of a characters characteristics, such as a PaleoCode [