Abstract
Introduction
Citation
Citing texts
- each unit has a place in a sequence
- each unit has a place in a citation hierarchy
- each unit belongs to a version of the text situated in an ontological hierarchy of group-author-[edition/translation]-exemplar
- citation units may include further structural information (markup), in addition to the explicit identification of the citation structure
This brief overview of the CTS URN has shown that this standard does the following:
Citing discrete objects
- left edge of the region
- top edge of the region
- width
- height
The URN urn:cite:hmt:chsimg.VA001VN-0503 identifies a unique object in the chsimg Collection; the URN urn:cite:hmt:chsimg.VA001VN-0503:0,0,0.5,0.5 specifically cites a region on that unique image. (The region is the top left quarter of the image: that is, beginning at the top left corner — 0,0 — and extending across 50% of the image in width, and 50% in height.)
Retrieval
We can use URL rewriting support in web servers like Apache Tomcat to reformat in the form
This concise form is easy to write, and easy for human eyes to interpret.
Relations of objects and semantic navigation
Describing related pairs of objects
Graphs of relations
Clients and end-users
- Formats the requested passage’s metadata (work-group, title, publication information) for display to human readers;
- Formats the passage itself, including line-numbers, editorial content, and any other embedded markup or features we choose to support;
- Finds the and elements, which contain CTS URNs to the passages preceding and following the requested passage, in the requested edition of the text, and turn those into URLs, links for navigation.
For the CHS Image Extension, the default stylesheet reads the (very simple) XML returned as a resonse to the URL and transforms it into a sophisticated web-application that draws a dynamic view of a high-resolution digital image that the user can zoom and pan dynamically in the browser.
Conclusions
- We can identify any object of study—text, data-object, image—by URN …
- … at any level of granularity
- … whether or not the resource we cite is on line
- We can assert relationships among texts, objects, and images with a simple triplet of URN + verb + URN.
- We can generate a list of all relationships for any object as a series of triplets expressed as RDF XML.
- We can turn that XML expression of a point in the graph of relationships into any number of dynamic, navigable end-user applications.
- We can “resolve” any URN with one of three URLs, turning the citation into a quotation.
At the time of this writing, the graph of objects in the HMT numbers in the hundreds of thousands. As we add more edited texts of scholia, more information about morphology and syntax, information about the three-dimensional shape of manuscript pages, alignments between different photographs of manuscript pages, and more scholarly commentary (each comment stored as a CITE Object with a CITE URN) this number will rapidly reach millions.