Unus non sufficit orbis (One World is not Enough) http://unus-fe.netseven.it/, is a multilingual digital library formed by maps and books concerning Catholic missionary cartography. In this project, cartography is intended in a broad sense to mean not only the practice of drawing maps but also the writing about real, imaginary and spiritual places. Library records are carefully composed and mutually connected to allow users to exploit the potential of the semantic web and navigate, in a virtual manner, across the continents in which Catholic missionaries established their presence from the end of the XVI century to the first half of the XX century.
An important output of the project will be the improvement of the open source software platform UNUS NON SUFFICIT ORBIS (http://unus-fe.netseven.it/), an innovative space for the academic and education communities, in which users will be able to explore different domains and sources in an organic and accurate fashion. Net7 will continue to be a partner in this project. If the project is supported, Net7's professional expertise will go a long way towards assuring that the objectives set out in this proposal are achieved within the project time frame. Their improvement proposal can be accessed at the following link: https://drive.google.com/drive/priority.
Another significant outcome of the project will be the development of a diachronic multilingual lexicon devoted to modelling the most relevant terms and concepts occurring in the maps included in the digital library. As is well known, these historical artefacts are characterised by a large number of cartouches providing information about the geography, history and customs of the world at that time as well as cosmological and cosmographic data. The multilingual computational lexicon will be built using two key Semantic Web technologies, i.e. the Web Ontology Language (OWL) and the Resource Description Framework (RDF). In the ontological level, concepts and properties will receive a structured and formal representation using OWL-DL. Instead, the morphological and semantic description of the terms composing the terminological level will be based on the lexical model lemon (McCrae et al. 2017), which constitutes a standard de facto in the field of Computational Lexicography, as it is currently used for representing and publishing lexical resources as RDF. In this way, in accordance with the principles of open science, data will be FAIR (Wilkinson et al. 2016). i.e. findable, interoperable and accessible and can be used, shared and integrated in other research contexts and in a multidisciplinary perspective.
As already experienced in the TOTUS MUNDUS project (Piccini et al. 2018), modelling the classical Chinese language in lemon will constitute a springboard to tackle lexicographic issues concerning the adoption of models designed mainly for Western languages, so as to create lexicons in languages which are typologically different from the so-called "standard average European¿. More appropriate linguistic categories will need to be introduced in order to model specific features of the Chinese language or ¿ more generally ¿ of Asian languages.
The aim of the computational lexicon is to provide semantic access to the texts contained in the maps and thus to support scholars in their endeavour to shed light on the profound cultural and linguistic changes caused by the advent of the Catholic missionaries. Each term described in the resource, indeed, will be linked to all those textual passages where it occurs. Such an integration will make it possible to perform refined queries, thus paving the way to new sophisticated access to the content of the maps stored in the digital library. For example, scholars will be able to search for all those textual passages where a specific concept has been addressed, independently from the terms denoting it within the same language (intra-linguistic variation) and the different languages of the texts (inter-linguistic variation: in our case Chinese, Arabic, Latin) or to cluster the maps according to different criteria. Through simple queries, users will be able to better identify different scenarios, such as: (i) concepts introduced by Christianity which have no conceptual equivalent in the previous religious tradition, hence no terms representing them; (ii) concepts introduced by Christianity which are represented by existing terms expressing a similar meaning; and (iii) terms belonging to the local religious tradition which have been maintained but have acquired a new meaning.
The Lexicon we aim to build will be diachronic. The choice to construct a diachronic resource mainly depends on the need to show the lexical and conceptual evolution entailed by the advent of Catholic faith in the world. Hence, in addition to synchronic variations (synonymy, allomorphism etc.), we will model temporal aspects as well (date ranges, events, and linearly ordered sets of time instants). To reach this objective, we will adapt and extend, if necessary, the existing approaches supporting the diachronic representation of time together with reasoning and navigational features.