The effective reuse of provenance-related information from catalogues of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts depends, ultimately, on the approach taken by the manuscript cataloguer towards recording provenance. There are two possible approaches:
- Recording the physical evidence found in the manuscript itself, usually in the form of a series of notes or narrative statements about the manuscript’s history;
- Assembling a structured list of successive stages in the ownership of the manuscript, usually in chronological order, together with information about the evidence for each stage.
This short paper is the result of the MMM Project’s work in transforming TEI-XML documents from Medieval Manuscripts in Oxford Libraries into RDF triples which could be mapped to the MMM unified data model.
It assesses the results of this process, and examines ways of structuring TEI-encoded descriptions in order to improve the effectiveness of their mapping to event-centric data models.
You can read more about the MMM Project’s work with the Oxford TEI-XML data in this forthcoming paper: Burrows, Toby, Athanasios Velios, Matthew Holford, David Lewis, Andrew Morrison, and Kevin Page, ‘Transforming TEI Manuscript Descriptions into RDF Graphs,’ Scholarly Digital Editions, Graph Data-Models and Semantic Web Technologies (GraphSDE) 2019 proceedings, forthcoming 2020