Purpose and Scope
OTRA's ontology and datasets aim to represent intertextual relations and argumentative statements within interreligious encounters as Linked Data. Intertextual relations were established on the basis of existing text editions in which scholars claim that passages of the edited text is related to some external content, often also text passages. To clarify these claims, the connections were precisely located within both the source and the target text. Argumentative statements were the attributed to the text and linked to the specific passages where they appear. Together, these Connective Claims and Statements allow studying how scriptural citations were used to argue in interreligious discourse, and how this changed over time.
The Model
Connective Claims
Connective Claims are defined as follows: Through the speech act 'A', a scholar S claims (i.e., expresses her belief and promises) that understanding of B can be enriched by considering C. A simple example is when a text contains the phrase "In the beginning was the word", and a scholar adds a footnote indicating that our understanding can be enriched by comparing it to John 1,1 from the Bible.
Each Connective Claim has a subject (B) and an object (C). The subject is the text under discussion and belongs to the class TextFragment. The object is the piece of information intended to "enrich our understanding". It is often also a TextFragment, but it can be any other type of information.
To provide a more nuanced assessment of the connection, one can use subclasses of Connective Claim such as TextualParallel or TopicalParallel, and assign a ParallelType.
Positions
To situate a TextFragment within a text, it is assigned two Positions: one indicating where it begins (fromPos) and the other where it ends (toPos). Each Position has two attributes: the textual unit (a lrm:Expression) it belongs to and an offset (xsd:int), which indicates the specific part of the unit where the position is located. For example, a position might have the unit "Ricc_CLS__B.4.3" and an offset of 23, indicating the 23rd word of the 3rd paragraph of the 4th chapter of Contra Legem Sarracenorum.
Works outside the primary sources studied may have an offset based on how they are canonically cited. For example, when quoting biblical passages, the book of the bible is used as the Unit (e.g. John 1) and the verse as the Offset (1).
Identifiers for Textual Units (Paragraphs, Text Fragments)
Fragments are situated in Blocks of text, often corresponding to paragraphs (doco:paragraph). Blocks of texts receive uniform identifiers in the format: WORK_ID__ + "B" (for Block) + (Wider Unit, e.g. Chapter).(Narrower Unit, e.g. Paragraph). For identification in printed texts, the first words and the last words of a Block are provided with otra:has_incipit and otra:has_explicit.
Text Fragments follow the same convention, but also include their units, for example: Ricc_CLS__B.6.5_48-88. These fragments can span multiple blocks.
Statements
Argumentative statements are assigned a Statement ID and a string that captures their content. To indicate where they occur in a text, these statements are otra:expressed_in a TextFragment, which again receives a Location.
Use of External Vocabularies and Standards
CIDOC CRM and LRMoo function as the top level ontologies. For modeling Connective Claims, I used the basic structure of data from the HypermediaDanteNetwork Ontology. To specify the types of Connective Claims, I integrated the categories of intertextual re-use from Sharing Ancient Wisdoms. Finally I added a vocabulary to describe whether and how an author is signalling that they are quoting another author, which is modelled after the categories of the HyperHamlet project (sadly unavailable nowadays).
Books of the Bible are standardized according to the Book Identifiers of the United Bible Societies
Data
Primary Works
The primary works used in this project are the following:
| Author | Work(s) | Edition |
|---|---|---|
| Riccoldo da Monte di Croce | Contra Legem Sarracenorum | Web-Edition by Emilio Panella |
| Petrus de Pennis | Tractatus contra Alchoranum | Preliminary edition by Fernando González-Muñoz |
| Anonymous | Epitome bellorum Sacrorum | Edition by Jacob Langeloh, Open Access |
| John of Ragusa | Confessio fidei coram Saracenis and Fragmentum de comparatione legum, scilicet Evangelii et Alchorani | Edition by Jacob Langeloh, Open Access, Mirror |
| Juan de Segovia | De gladio divini spiritus in corda mittendo Sarracenorum | Edition by Ulli Roth (full text not available) |
| Nicholas of Cusa | Cribratio Alkorani | Cusanus Portal, Google Books |
Dataset: OTRAone
The first dataset contains the Blocks of CLS and Connective
Claims from three works that are related to CLS, namely the
Epitome bellorum sacrorum, Confessio fidei und
De comparatione legum by John of Ragusa, and
De gladio by Juan de Segovia. The other parts will be
added over time. The dataset can be found on Github
