Transforming TEI Manuscript Descriptions into RDF Graphs

This paper reports on the transformation of the Bodleian Library’s online medieval manuscripts catalogue, based on the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines, into RDF graphs using the CIDOC-CRM and FRBROO ontologies which enable integration of datasets. The catalogue uses the “Manuscript Description” section of the TEI Guidelines to encode entries which were originally published in printed form, but also incorporates amendments and additions from unpublished documents prepared in the Bodleian Library. The transformation of this catalogue has required the development of processes to extract the relevant elements from the TEI XML documents, assemble these extracts into a new XML file, and match the various elements and attributes to CIDOC-CRM and FRBROO entities and properties which can be expressed as RDF triples and incorporated into graph databases.

As a result of this work, information from the manuscripts catalogue has been ingested into Linked Data graph databases developed by two Oxford projects: (a) OXLOD, a pilot project on Linked Data in Oxford which brought together data from a range of Oxford’s cultural institutions, and (b) Mapping Manuscript Migrations, an international project designed to track the ownership and provenance of medieval manuscripts using data from several databases related to manuscript history (Burrows, Hyvönen, Ransom and Wijsman, 2018). The specific aims of these two projects are somewhat different, and their technical infrastructure also differs: OXLOD used the ResearchSpace software developed by the British Museum and Metaphacts (Oldman and Tanase 2018), while Mapping Manuscript Migrations uses Fuseki SPARQL servers combined with a customized environment built with React and NodeJS (Hyvönen et al. 2019). But the projects share a common methodology which relies on mapping to RDF and Linked Data to integrate heterogeneous datasets relating to cultural heritage objects.