Digital Ancient Cypriot Literature
The Ancient Cypriot Literature Digital Corpus (ACLDC) project is one of the flagship research initiatives of the Cyprus Institute hosted by the Science and Technology in Archaeology Research Center (STARC). The project has been generously supported by the A.G. Leventis Foundation. It is the first completed segment of ‘Dioptra’, the Edmée Leventis Digital Library for Cypriot Culture, which develops in modules dedicated in the study of various aspects of the cultural heritage of Cyprus.
The aim of the ACLDC project was the creation of a digital library able to enhance and develop the momentous six-volume corpus of Ancient Cypriot Literature authored by Andreas Voskos, Ioannis Taifacos, Costas Michaelides and their collaborators Andreas Louca and Efi Chatziantoniou - Demosthenou under the supervision of Patroclos Stavrou, published by the A. G. Leventis foundation. ACLDC offers a new searchable digital library that will be accessible online and will engage its users in the study of Ancient Cypriot Literature providing an array of novel digital applications designed to enhance user experience well beyond the original printed volumes.
From its initial steps the ACLDC project responded to challenges that most contemporary digital libraries face caused by the lack of interoperability between online digital repositories; it is the lack of a common language that makes information exchange and communication between these databases almost impossible. To avoid this problem, the design of ACLDC focused on its compatibility with the specifications supported by the semantic web. Furthermore, for the development of the technical characteristics of ACLDC we used an already semantically enable content management system framework Drupal 7. Drupal is an open source CMS with a large community of programmers and users. It is built on PHP programing language and stores all its content on MySQL relational database. Additional technical features consist the digitization of all linguistic aspects of ancient Greek texts and the development of special algorithms that enables the intelligent search of ancient texts. Moreover, we connected automatically, all the Ancient Greek words with LSJ dictionary.
The addition of digital images, maps and three-dimensional representations of archaeological material and finds enhance the experience of ancient texts. Cypriot archaeology is thus effectively utilized as a resource that enriches the study of ancient texts on Cyprus. This paper addresses the creation of ACLDC, its technical specifications and capabilities and finally to its potential advancement as a research and educational tool.
URL:http://akg.cyi.ac.cy/
