Development of content-based metadata scheme of classical poetry in thai national historical corpus

Abstract

This paper addresses a conceptual framework and an application of a content-based metadata scheme of classical poetry currently deployed in the Thai National Historical Corpus (TNHC). The corpus aims to collect texts representing the Thai language from different historical periods. Applying a metadata modeling approach, the variation of classical Thai poetry is analyzed in terms of components in every verse form. The compositions of wak, baat, stanza, paragraph, and chapter are identified as main elements for the conceptual framework. For theatrical works, essential elements including and tags were also implemented. TNHC selectively applied certain standard TEI encoding elements, in XML format, to describe the content structure of the poetry. This is an early attempt to develop a metadata scheme for classical Thai poetry. There are still a number of opportunities to improve the discovery and interoperability of the collection as well as to enhance the data entry process, data management, and retrieval performance of the corpus.