An XML-based Information System for Old Occitan Medical Terminology

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The first funding phase of this project, originally laid out for six years, will end in Dec. 2015. The aim of the project is to cover the Old Occitan medico-botanical terminology for the first time and within a digital lexicographic system. Our text corpus consists of existing editions and transcripts of manuscripts that have been additionally made in the framework of the project by our Italian project partner M.S. Corradini (Pisa) and the applicants and their staff. Due to the important presence of Jewish medicine in medieval Southern France, a considerable part of the O.Occ. medical terminology is conserved in Hebrew texts and written in Hebrew characters. The explanations in these texts - mainly through equivalent terms in Arabic - are fundamental to our understanding of the meaning of the O.Occ. vocabulary at issue. As for digitalization, we have been cooperating with the Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale of the CNR (Pisa), using the system Pinakes Text (PTK), which was developed at the Fondazione Rinascimento Digitale in Florence. In the first funding period, we have developed a highly differentiated lexicographic structure for covering lemmata and variants in two alphabets, which we implemented in PTK in the shape of an object-oriented database. For data input, we developed a comprehensive web-based input tool, which is used by all the project participants. The entry of lemmata and variants will have been accomplished up to 50% by the end of the first funding period (appr. 4000 variants assigned to around 1900 lemmata). This includes a first description of meaning through correspondences/paraphrases in French and, as far as possible, by using the scientific terminology. We have also begun to register the terms in other languages (mainly Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin) that are indicated as equivalents in the manuscripts. The project prolongation that we apply for here aims at finalizing the system in another three years and making it accessible through a web based query tool. The query tool will also provide linkage between the lexical information and the texts as well as the possibility of obtaining concordances. The whole lexicographic system will be also available in XML through an export function, which we have already started working upon. As for the contents, the prolongation of the project focuses on the input of the remaining terms of the corpus and their Arabic and Hebrew correspondences as well as on the enhancement of the semantic component. As we had already planned in the initial proposal, we will provide an ontological classification on three levels (classical onomasiological "Begriffssystem", modern scientific classification, and medieval humoral-pathological classification). In this respect, we have already done some preliminary work during the first funding period. Within this framework, extensive research on the meaning of many of the O.Occ. terms is needed, which can often only be understood through Hebrew and Arabic.