Encoding Medieval Charters in Preparation of a Diplomatic Semantic Web. Combining the TEI with the Vocabulaire International de la Diplomatique

Vujošević, Žarko and Vogeler, Georg (2026) Encoding Medieval Charters in Preparation of a Diplomatic Semantic Web. Combining the TEI with the Vocabulaire International de la Diplomatique. Digital Medievalist [Online], 19. pp. 1-36. ISSN 1715-0736

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Abstract

This contribution considers the question of encoding concepts of Diplomatics in digital scholarly editions. As a specialised historical discipline, Diplomatics deals with medieval documents, which seem to be a particularly challenging source type for digital presentation using current standards for text encoding. Following the practice of the annotation approach, we try to address this challenge by combining appropriate established systems: using standard TEI (Text Encoding Initiative), enhancing it with concepts from the domain-specific Vocabulaire International de la Diplomatique (VID). Transferring this approach to the digital database Diplomatarium Serbicum Digitale (DSD), it becomes obvious that the VID could be improved via its SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System) version. We discuss how simple reorganisation, addition of terms, and only rare changes to existing definitions allow us to use the VID for specialisations of generic TEI elements, and we demonstrate this in an example. Following from this approach, a Semantic Web-based model of charter descriptions can be inserted into TEI encoding

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