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# Greening your database of literary works: How to avoid reinventing vocabularies, in favor of sustainable, reusable models

Kelly Christensen, Jean-Baptiste Camps

► To cite this version:

Kelly Christensen, Jean-Baptiste Camps. Greening your database of literary works: How to avoid reinventing vocabularies, in favor of sustainable, reusable models. Digital Humanities 2025 (DH2025), ADHO, Jul 2025, Lisbon, Portugal. hal-05059049

HAL Id: hal-05059049

https://enc.hal.science/hal-05059049v1

Submitted on 7 May 2025

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# Greening your database of literary corpora

How to avoid reinventing vocabularies, in favor of sustainable, reusable data models

Jean-Baptiste Camps

Kelly Christensen

DH 2025

Lisbon, 17th July 2025, *Session SP-31*

École nationale des chartes, PSL

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École
nationale
des
chartes

PSL

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* Project: LostMa

* European Research Council

* 5 years (all good things come to an end)

* Goal

* Model the transmission of Medieval stories, texts and manuscripts (and estimate survival rate)

* Problem

* Group manuscripts (easy to distinguish, libraries do this all the time) by narrative content (more abstract, less standardised)

* Challenge

* Minimize original ontology. Rely on existing frameworks and digital resources.

* Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable (FAIR)
# Problem: Modelling narrative traditions

What data model makes versions of a story findable (groups them) but also reuses the main bibliographic ontologies?

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Le conte
du graal

Parzival

Chrétien
de Troyes

Wolfram von
Eschenbach

Old French

Middle High
German
FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship (2016)

<table><tr><td>F</td><td>A</td><td>I</td><td>R</td></tr><tr><td>Findable</td><td>Accessible</td><td>Interoperable</td><td>Reusable</td></tr></table>

* Greener digital data storage and distribution<fnref n="1" />

* Minimal single-use documentation

* Efficient integration in other projects

<footnote n="1">¹Marion Ficher et al. “Assessing the carbon footprint of the data transmission on a backbone network”. In: 2021 24th Conference on Innovation in Clouds, Internet and Networks and Workshops (ICIN). Paris, France, Mar. 2021.</footnote>
The big groups:

* Comité International pour la DOCumentation (CIDOC)

* International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA)

* Dublin Core (DC)

The main ontologies:

<table><thead><tr><th>Org.</th><th>Year</th><th>Ver.</th><th>Model</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>IFLA</td><td>1998</td><td>1.0</td><td>Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR)</td></tr><tr><td>CIDOC</td><td>2006</td><td>1.0</td><td>Conceptual Reference Model (CRM)</td></tr><tr><td>IFLA</td><td>2016</td><td>2.4</td><td>Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records Object-Oriented (FRBRoo)</td></tr><tr><td>IFLA</td><td>2017</td><td>1.0</td><td>Library Reference Model (LRM)</td></tr><tr><td>CIDOC</td><td>2022</td><td>7.1.12</td><td>CRM</td></tr><tr><td>IFLA</td><td>2024</td><td>1.0</td><td>Library Reference Model Object-Oriented (LRMoo)</td></tr></tbody></table>
Library Reference Model Object-Oriented (LRM00), built atop
the CRM

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LostMa Ontology, built atop the LRM<sub>00</sub>

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LostMa Ontology, simplified

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Solution: Perceval example (revisited)

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Solution: Multi-use documentation (text)

Namespaces: lrmoo (IFLA), dcterms (DCMI), dc (DCMI)

<lrmoo:F2_Expression id="48572">
  <dcterms:title>Perceval</dcterms:title>
  <dcterms:language>fro</dcterms:language>
  <dcterms:created>1196-01-01/1210-12-31</dcterms:created>
  <dc date>Vers 1200</dc date>
  <lrmoo:R4_is_enclosed_in>
    <lrmoo:F3_Manifestation id="54725">
      <!-- Witness metadata -->
    </lrmoo:R4_is_enclosed_in>
  </lrmoo:F2_Expression>
Solution: Multi-use documentation (witness)

Namespaces: lrmoo (IFLA), dcterms (DCMI), crm (CIDOC), bibo (DCMI)

<lrmoo:F3_Manifestation id="54725">
  <dcterms:created>1301-01-01/1400-12-31</dcterms:created>
  <lrmoo:R7_is_exemplified_by>
    <lrmoo:F5 moments id="53068">
      <bibo:locator>
        <bibo:pages>
          <bibo:pageStart>96r</bibo:pageStart>
          <bibo:pageEnd>126v</bibo:pageEnd>
        </bibo:pages>
      </bibo:locator>
      <crm:P46iώforms_part_of>
        <crm:E22_Human-Made_Object id="46077"/>
        <!-- Document metadata -->
      </crm:P46iώforms_part_of>
    </lrmoo:F5 moments>
  </lrmoo:R7_is_exemplified_by>
</lrmoo:F3_Manifestation>
## In progress

* Off-load documentation of our data model to existent digital resources by linking our ontology to others' documentation

* Side goal: save on resources for maintaining online documentation (esp. after project ends)

* Map more properties to our core (LRM<sub>OO</sub>, CRM) entities

## Future work

* Accommodate more uncertainty in values, i.e. dates:

* earliest possible date

* estimated earliest date

* estimated latest date

* latest possible date

* Accommodate source citation on properties