A Semantic Model for Historical Manuscripts
This work addresses the needs of Saussurean humanists for studying and publishing historical manuscripts, but it is incremental as it builds on existing interdisciplinary approaches without introducing a new paradigm.
The paper tackles the problem of representing and reasoning about time-varying statements and domain knowledge in historical scientific manuscripts, specifically Saussure's manuscripts, by developing a semantic model and implementation techniques for indexing and temporal reasoning.
The study and publication of historical scientific manuscripts are com- plex tasks that involve, among others, the explicit representation of the text mean- ings and reasoning on temporal entities. In this paper we present the first results of an interdisciplinary project dedicated to the study of Saussure's manuscripts. These results aim to fulfill requirements elaborated with Saussurean humanists. They comprise a model for the representation of time-varying statements and time-varying domain knowledge (in particular terminologies) as well as imple- mentation techniques for the semantic indexing of manuscripts and for temporal reasoning on knowledge extracted from the manuscripts.