KELLIA White Paper on Linked Data Standards andPractices for Digital Coptic
By Elizabeth Platte, Caroline T. Schroeder, Ulrich Schmid

From the Koptische/Coptic Electronic Language and Literature International
Alliance (KELLIA) Project (​https://kellia.uni-goettingen.de​)
Product of a joint Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities(HG-229371) and Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (BE 4172/1-1)
Project Directors: Caroline T. Schroeder, University of the Pacific(American PI), Amir Zeldes, Georgetown University (co-PI), Heike Behlmer,
Georg-August University, Göttingen; Göttingen Academy of Sciences andHumanities (German PI)Institutional Grantees: University of the Pacific (NEH), Georgetown
University (NEH), Georg-August University (DFG)The KELLIA White Paper on Linked Data Standards and Practices for Digital Coptic by
Elizabeth Platte, Caroline T. Schroeder, Ulrich Schmid​ is licensed under a ​Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License​.

27 March 2019

Linked Data Standards and Practices for Digital Coptic
Members of the Advisory Boards for the Coptic Scriptorium project and the Digital
Edition of the Coptic Old Testament project as well as project participants havereviewed this document prior to publication. This White Paper is also attached to themain KELLIA project White Paper(h​ ttps://kellia.uni-goettingen.de/downloads/KELLIA-white-paper.pdf​) ​as Appendix 5.

1.

Introduction

As part of the overall KELLIA collaboration goal of establishing data standards for
related and future projects, KELLIA set out to create standards that ensurecollaboration, data-exchange, and compatibility in linked-data initiatives across digital
Coptic projects. To this end, we have met with members of other projects working onlinked data initiatives in the ancient world, created products that are a result of dataexchange and link data across project in the KELLIA collaboration, and consideredcurrent practices in linked data when establishing standards, especially for metadata.
KELLIA partners and other digital projects working in Coptic need robust linked data
infrastructure that allows linking between KELLIA projects and to other projects, evenwhen standards between projects vary.
Several projects currently present opportunities to link geographical data from theancient world. In particular, US KELLIA partners have begun to work with Pleiades(​https://pleiades.stoa.org/​), a digital gazetteer of the ancient world. In doing so, they
have also worked with Pelagios (​http://commons.pelagios.org/​), which provides
infrastructure for linking geographic data. Pelagios works largely with projects focusedon the ancient and medieval periods. Both US and German KELLIA projects have also
used Trismegistos (​http://www.trismegistos.org/​) identifiers in metadata. Trismegistos isa group of metadata databases of information about texts, collections, authors, people,and places. It originally began with information from papyrological and epigraphic
information from Egypt, but has since expanded to information from the ancient
Mediterranean world more generally.
Finally, KELLIA partners also look forward to working with PAThs(​http://paths.uniroma1.it/)​, a project focused on putting Coptic literary texts into theirgeographic context. PAThs plans to produce an “Archaeological Atlas of Coptic
Literature,” and, in doing so, collect and classify information about Coptic literature,1

collections, manuscripts, colophons, authors, copyists, donors, and institutions. Unlike
Trismegistos, which does not contain a comprehensive catalogue of Coptic manuscripts
and manuscript fragments, the PAThs project plans to provide permanent identifiers for
Coptic text-bearing objects. Ideally, future work will entail collaborating with
Trismegistos to update their catalogues. Such work will be very valuable for KELLIA
members, and controlled vocabularies and metadata standards in Coptic digital
humanities will certainly be influenced by the work of the PAThs project. Because
PAThs is a relatively new project, KELLIA partners are awaiting PAThs outcomes totake advantage of linked data opportunities more fully. Sharing and linking data makes
the work of the individual projects and initiatives that are part of KELLIA more valuable,
as other projects use and expand it. This has already been demonstrated by outcomesof sharing data noted below. Linking data to projects both within and outside of KELLIA
also makes our individual work more discoverable.

2.

KELLIA Linked Data Products

Online Coptic Dictionary:​ Entries in the online dictionary (​http://coptic-dictionary.org​)
are linked to Coptic SCRIPTORIUM digital textual data (described in more detail in themain KELLIA White Paper ​Grant Products section​). The same linking opportunities areavailable to KELLIA partners and other Coptic-language projects, who can freely
annotate their digital texts with links to online dictionary lemma searches.
Coptic Treebank: ​The automatic syntactic annotation lays the groundwork for linking
data about entities in Coptic texts, as described below. The treebank standards
themselves are described in more detail in the main KELLIA White Paper ​Grant
Products section​.
Entity recognition: ​Proof-of-concept machine-processed entity-recognition (describedin more detail in the main KELLIA White Paper ​Grant Products section​) will allow for
entity disambiguation and linking opportunities for Coptic literature to named entities
projects such as Pelagios, Pleiades, Trismegistos, PATHs.
VMR-Coptic SCRIPTORIUM Converter: ​This converter (described in more detail inthe main KELLIA White Paper ​Grant Products section​) transforms digital text data
produced by the Coptic Old Testament project’s Virtual Manuscript Room to the EpiDoc
TEI XML format used by Coptic SCRIPTORIUM and pushes this XML text to Coptic
SCRIPTORIUM’s natural language processing pipeline. This converter facilitates theintegration of digital text corpora developing in both projects.

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3.

Recommended standards

The KELLIA project recommends the following linked data standards, described in moredetail below.
● Projects should adopt and publicly document controlled vocabularies for use inmetadata, thus ensuring data integrity and the possibility of linking via API(section 3a)● Projects should provide automated metadata validation whenever possible(section 3a)● Projects should include metadata fields for collaborators’ unique identifiers(section 3a)● Projects should assign persistent identifiers to the digital objects they produce(section 3b)● Projects should include clear licensing information to facilitate data exchange(section 3b)
3a Standards for controlled vocabulary
In order to facilitate retrieving, linking, and exchanging data, KELLIA partners haveagreed upon recommended metadata and data structures, as outlined in the metadata
standards appendix of this grant report. We recommend all digital Coptic projects
establish internal controlled vocabularies for metadata. Such vocabularies provide
internal standards for populating metadata fields to ensure data integrity. Additionally, inthe absence of a robust hub for linked data (akin to Pelagios or Trismegistos), controlled
vocabularies lay the groundwork for linking via API’s or queries rendered in http URI
syntax. (E.g., in Coptic Scriptorium’s environment, the query
http://data.copticscriptorium.org/filter/author=Shenoute​ retrieves all documents where
the “author” metadatum is “Shenoute”, andhttp://data.copticscriptorium.org/filter/collection=Borgia%20Collection​ retrieves all
documents where the “collection metadatum is “Borgia Collection”). Controlled
vocabularies accessed through URI based queries can enable a project to achieve
4-star level linked data. Well-documented internal standards can also help to facilitate
the exchange of data, as conversions can be applied to communicate across different
project standards. Standards thus lay the groundwork for a more robust linking
environment for Coptic data in the future (such as Pelagios is for ancient geography).

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To date, standard controlled vocabularies (such as Dublin Core, Getty, or theEuropeana EAGLE Vocabularies1) do not provide the coverage needed for Coptic
literary materials, and there is no comprehensive standard for controlled vocabulary forfields such as places, names, document identification, etc. in digital Coptic. Despite thislack of standard, we recommend projects develop internal standards, and the metadata
guidelines in this White Paper provide models. We also recommend an automatedprocess for metadata validation to ensure adherence to internal standards wheneverpossible. Our current annotation editor, the open source online XML editor GitDox,
provides automatic checking of metadata field names and values, ensuring that required
metadata appears and matches regular expression patterns specifying valid valuesacross our documents. Likewise, whenever possible, projects should include unique
identifiers assigned to metadata fields by other projects. KELLIA partners should
therefore include a field for CoptOT/Coptic SCRIPTORIUM identifiers in metadata.
The Coptic Old Testament project has created and shared a list of standard names for
institutions that have Coptic manuscripts in order to standardize their metadata. Theirlist can be found here:(​https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jDeRLhM9tlG9pzkUWbyoi7CD2_L4yLdDM1yJ18ToT9A/edit#gid=0​). It includes references to the respective entries in theTrismegistos “Collections” table ​http://www.trismegistos.org/coll/index.php​ Suchstandards will make the discovery and exchange of data across projects easier.
3b Standards for unique identifiers
As mentioned in the recommendations for data curation, digital objects created by eachprojects should be assigned persistent identifiers, such as Digital Object Identifiers orother Unique Resource Identifiers that are accessible via a URL (1.3.3). Section on
KELLIA current practices. Coptic SCRIPTORIUM assigns a unique document title toeach document as well as CTS (Canonical Text Service) URNs(​http://www.homermultitext.org/hmt-doc/cite/cts-urn-overview.html​) for the digital data intheir corpora. The URN schema includes two namespaces created specifically for
Coptic materials: copticLit for literary materials and copticDoc for documentarymaterials. Coptic SCRIPTORIUM provides a service (​data.copticscriptorium.org​) toresolve these URNs, and they can also be used in the ANNIS search and visualizationinterface.
Finally, as mentioned in the recommendations for data curation standards, all projects
should have clear licensing attached to all products in order to facilitate data sharing
1​https://www.eagle-network.eu/resources/vocabularies/4and linking (1.3.4). Ideally, this information should both be included in the metadata
associated with each digital object and be evident or easily findable through any
web-based interface used to display the object.

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Future plans in Coptic linked data

KELLIA partners look forward to continuing to share data and standards, as well as
collaborating with other Coptic and ancient studies projects. We have already begun towork with Pelagios and Pleiades to link our geographic data and make it discoverable toa wider scholarly and popular audience. We are especially excited about working with
the PAThs project in the future, as their proposed interlinked databases will provide an
opportunity for other Coptic projects to review data and metadata standards in relation
to their work.

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