Using RDFa to Link Text and Dictionary Data for Medieval French

This paper presents an endeavor to transform a scholarly text edition (of a medical treatise written in Middle French) into a digital edition enriched with references to an on-line dictionary. Hitherto published as a book, the resulting digital edition will use RDFa to interlink its vocabulary with the corresponding lexical entries of the Dictionnaire étymologique de l’ancien français (DEAF). We demonstrate the feasibility of RDFa for the semantic enrichment of digital editions within the philologies. In particular, the technological support forRDFa excels beyond domain-specific solutions favored by the TEI community. Our findings may thus contribute to future technological bridges between TEI/XML and (Linguistic) Linked Open Data resources.The original data of the edition is available in a LATEX format that includes profound semantic markup. We convert this data into XML/TEI, and integrate RDFa-compliant attributes for every lexeme attested in the text. The HTML5 edition generated from the XML sources preserves the RDFa attributes and thus (a) embeds (links) its vocabulary within the overall system of the medieval French language, and that (b) provides and displays linguistic features (say, sense definitions given in the original corpus data) along with the critical apparatus of the original book publication.

, 2018