Collaborative and multidisciplinary annotations of ancient texts: The Euporia system

Euporia is an annotation system originally created to study the ritual dynamics in ancient Greek tragedies from an anthropological perspective. The system is designed to be flexible enough so that it can be easily extended in other directions of multidisciplinary research. The system combines the simplicity of a web interface pared down to its essential elements with the expressivity of a domain-specific language parsed with ANTLR, that avoids the verbosity of general-purpose markup languages (such as XML-TEI) during the annotation phase. In this way, the user is focused on domain-specific tasks by writing concise annotations. Upon exportation of our data, interoperability is ensured by two measures: references to the annotated text are translated from a system based on progressive word numbers to the Canonical Text Services (CTS) system, and the annotations are translated into XML-TEI. An annotation is constituted by a text reference, a condition related to variant readings and interpretations of the same text, as well as by a sequence of tags. Tags are created by following a bottom-up approach: they are progressively introduced and reused by the domain-expert during the annotation process. During revisions, tags are grouped and mapped onto an ontology, in order to enable and to exploit the identification of relations among the tags in querying the annotated corpus. Being designed for interoperability, our approach can be extended to other research fields (e.g. philology, archaeology) through the creation of new domain-specific languages and domain-specific tagsets, in order to improve the functionalities of the Euporia system.