Thinking like the "Modern Operating Systems": The Omega architecture and the Clavius on the Web project

The current digital turn in studying and analyzing historical documents results in both having machine actionable cultural data and providing software able to process them. However, these data and services often lack in integration strategies among them in order to be reused in other contexts different from the original ones. As pointed out by Franz Fischer in a worthy of note article: "There is no out-of-the-box software available for creating truly critical and truly digital editions at the same time" [1]. Likewise, Monica Berti stated that is now important to "build a model for representing quotations and text reuses of lost works in a digital environment" [2]. In this vision Bridget Almas is in charge of developing an integrated platform for collaboratively transcribing, editing, and translating historical documents and texts. She claimed that through this platform, called Perseids, students and scholars are able to create open source digital scholarly editions [3]. A number of interesting projects are currently under development to realize general models, digital services, and online tools that can be adopted as part of a long-term infrastructure for managing digital editions. Among Perseids and others, we cite as reference systems (a) the Textual Community project led by P. Robinson and B. Bordalejo, (b) the AustESE project led by the Australian eResearch group, (c) the Tagore Online Variorum "Bichitra" project led by Sukanta Chaudhuri, (d) Homer Multitext led by Neel Smith and Christopher Blackwell, (e) Sharing Ancient Wisdoms founded by the HERA network.