TEI, ontologies, linked open data: geolat and beyond

The profound dialogue TEI started with other semantic models has two aims: the data and documents interchange as well as the improvement of the editors’ possibilities to formally declare hermeneutical positions. TEI schema provides most of the elements/attributes (and now classes as well) useful to describe interpretation instances, while further schemas, as well as other value vocabularies and metadata element sets, are supposed to enhance some potentialities of the model itself. On the one hand, additional schemas could contribute to perfect the scope of some TEI elements, while, on the other hand, the existing ontologies could improve the interpretation effectiveness. The aforementioned considerations imply that that people working with texts today have some interesting opportunities such as: describing or enriching texts through TEI encoding; formalizing their knowledge of texts content(s) using one or more ontologies; offering Open Access to their work and, finally, making their data interoperable by means of Linked Open Data. Moreover, we could say that these options exist because digital libraries are becoming increasingly widespread. Actually, without digital texts collections, these opportunities would be mostly theoretical; however, we should also consider the resulting question that arises: “what can we do with digital texts”, avoiding the simple repetition of old approaches. Each of the opportunities mentioned aboveentails interesting implications: 1. TEI encoding is sufficiently flexible to allow texts annotation according to nearly every possible approach: syntax, grammar, morphology, phonology, content of any type, can be described. 2. ontologies allow the formal description (the output, we could say) of the portion of the knowledge humans have regarding a specific domain; 3. Open Access tries to break existing barriers and fosters collaboration and knowledge sharing; 4. the Linked Open Data (LOD) mechanism allows the interconnection of data and projects which were not intended to work together from the start but share a common method for describing and publishing data. All the items described above constitute the geolat – geography for Latin literature aim, a global project of Latin literature annotation which make use of TEI encoding and ontologies. The present research therefore intends to address the issues related to TEI collections management in a semantic perspective by presenting a specific case study.