Arts and Humanities E-Science Support Centre

eSAD Project Ph.D., October 2008 - September 2011

Henriette Roued-Cunliffe, Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents, Faculty of Classics, University of Oxford

A Decision Support System (DSS) for the reading of Ancient Documents

The aim of this doctoral research is to build a set of digital tools which will assist scholars in remembering complicated reasoning, searching large datasets, assessing research carried out by other experts and to enable collaborative investigation of a single document. The work involves building an ontology of the concepts which are fundamental to the process of deciphering and interpreting ancient documents.

Fig. 1. Ontology of the Decision Support System (DSS) covering the idea of evidence based percepts. © Henriette Roued Olsen. Reproduced with kind permission.

Henriette Roued Olsen has completed a nine-month training period in which she has enhanced and updated the resource Vindolanda Tablets Online and developed a new approach to the XML coding of the Vindolanda ink tablets. This approach enables a more flexible indexing system for the texts and will be included in the Decision Support System (DSS, previously called the Interpretation Support System, ISS) which she is designing and developing as a knowledge base accessible through web service technologies.

The aim of the DSS is to aid experts in reading the ancient documents. This involves designing an ontology of concepts for defining the essential characteristics of the documents themselves and of the processes of reading them. This includes, among other things, the development of the idea of a network of percepts, i.e. characteristics of the text as perceived by the interpreter.

Fig. 2. DSS use of the Web Service. © Henriette Roued Olsen. Reproduced with kind permission.>

Henriette's blog is at www.roued.com/e-doc.
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