Developing a knowledge base of ancient literary texts in virtual space

Abstract

In our paper we would like to introduce the organizational principles and main representation features of a knowledge base of ancient literary texts based on a three-dimensional virtual library model adopting the structure of the classification system of the ancient Library of Alexandria. Currently we are using the English translations of the selected ancient Greek texts as starting points to the knowledge base, but we intend to complete the provided content with other texts and multimedia materials. In our paper we focus on the content management and organization issues of the knowledge base. With respect to them it is crucially important to formulate our primary goals or mission, that is, why we think our collection of ancient materials could be especially useful and unique for its users. Because the average user needs a considerable amount of dictionaries and background knowledge to fully understand and interpret the ancient literary texts, the selected material should be carefully preprocessed and well organized. Our aim is to provide the necessary knowledge for each text available in the knowledge base in order that the texts could be `read at once' and without (much) effort. Therefore we introduce the cognitive framework that the preprocessing of literary texts and the representation features of our virtual library model are based on. Finally, we demonstrate our ideas by a carefully chosen example which illustrates the possible representations of two parallel translations of an ancient poem by Sappho.