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Date: Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 8:04 PM
Subject: [HASTRO-L] Fw: Cornell Chronicle: Classical Knowledge Base project
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From: Cornell Chronicle Online <
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Date: Wed, 2 Jun 2010 16:15:16
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Subject: Cornell Chronicle: Classical Knowledge Base project
Chronicle Online e-News
Got Ovid? Classical knowledge base will assist in
citing ancient Greek and Latin texts
http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/June10/ClassicsBase.html
June 2, 2010
By Daniel Aloi
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Scholars looking for multiple sources and
translations from among 1,000 years of ancient
Greek and Latin texts will have a powerful new
tool in their research arsenal with a database
being developed at Cornell.
The Classical Works Knowledge Base (CWKB) -- a
relational database and specialized link resolver
software -- will facilitate linking from
citations of ancient texts to the online versions
of those texts. The database will ultimately
cover all Latin and Greek authors from Homer to
Bede, from approximately the eighth century B.C.
to the mid-eighth century A.D.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation recently granted
$215,000 to the American Philological Association
(APA) to implement the project, spearheaded by
principal investigator Eric Rebillard, professor
of Classics and history, in collaboration with
Cornell librarians David Ruddy and Adam Chandler.
The APA project also received a Mellon planning
grant in 2008.
"I got in touch with University Librarian Anne
Kenney for consulting with library specialists
about the possibility of using the OpenURL
framework for linking citations to full texts.
She organized a meeting, and after that the
project developed in a collaborative way with
David Ruddy in E-Publishing and Adam Chandler in
Database Management," Rebillard said.
Rebillard, Ruddy and Chandler have developed a
working prototype at <
http://cwkb.org/>.
Rebillard expects the fully functional version of
CWKB to be online in two years.
CWKB works by parsing OpenURL links (commonly
used in libraries to help patrons retrieve
scholarly articles) once a citation has been
clicked on. OpenURL metadata is sent to the link
resolver, which "creates several links -- because
you can have several versions for the same
citation, in the original language and in
translation," Rebillard said.
"OpenURL was created about 10 years ago to solve
this problem of linking from a citation to the
full text," said Chandler, the database
management research librarian who programmed the
CWKB software. "The current OpenURL method of
journal citation isn't quite what we needed, so
we designed another metadata format for linking
to these canonical works."
The electronic version of the database of
classical bibliography L'Année philologique (The
Year in Philology) will be the first abstract and
index database to propose such links to CWKB.
Many other resources are potential users of the
new tool.
"For example, the works of the Founding Fathers
are full of references to classical texts,"
Rebillard said. "It would greatly enhance the
reading of the Founding Fathers to have links to
those texts."
With applications for canonical citations in
other fields and types of literature, the project
can serve as a model and tool for scholarship in
a number of disciplines.
"We've wanted to keep the OpenURL metadata part
of our project as widely useful as possible,"
Ruddy said. "This work can be applied to any
discipline that has developed conventions of
textual citation which are reasonably independent
of specific editions, such as in Biblical or
Shakespearean studies."
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