Studying the history of pre-modern zoology by extracting linked zoological data from mediaeval texts and reasoning on it

Abstract

In this paper we first present the international multidisci-plinary research network Zoomathia, which aims at studying the transmission of zoological knowledge from Antiquity to Middle Ages through varied resources, and considers especially textual information, including compilation literature such as encyclopaedias. We then present a preliminary work in the context of Zoomathia consisting in (i) extracting pertinent knowledge from mediaeval texts using Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods, (ii) semantically enriching semi-structured zoological data and publishing it as an RDF dataset and its vocabulary, linked to other relevant Linked Data sources, and (iii) reasoning on this linked RDF data to help epistemologists, historians and philologists in their analysis of these ancient texts. This paper is an extended and updated version of [13].