DIATHESIS
An Information System for documentation, management and promotion of historical documents
Description
DIATHESIS is an information system for documentation, management
and promotion of historical documents that supports both digital
library functionality and archival management of the original
documents. It includes OCR-based page analysis and subject clipping,
subject-level metadata generation, semantic indexing and multifaceted
classification of subjects using built-in thesauri. The data
produced by the OCR processing of the scanned material are used
for the creation of a highly flexible annotation interface which
allows users to perform hybrid annotations upon the digitized
material assigning semantic properties to specific regions of
text that represent a subject. The goal of the documentation
process is the creation of a coherent semantic backbone that
can be easily enriched with semantic relations. It is not meant
to be a complete semantic structure that includes all the semantic
relationships and entities (Actors, Places) described in the
text.
The query interface enables users to conduct searches on a document
as well as on a subject level basis combining both full text and
metadata search capabilities.
Queries on the document level are based on conventional metadata
assigned automatically to the whole document during the import
phase while queries on the subject level exploit the semantic relationships
that have emerged from the documentation phase. The combination
of the different query modes provides a semantic filter that greatly
improves the precision of the conducted searches. The subject’s
metadata are based on a robust top level domain ontology (CIDOC-CRM,
ISO 21127) in order to ensure that the produced knowledge can be
inter-exchanged between different institutions.
The query result presentation mechanism allows the partial download
of the digitized material in order to improve the overall user
experience and reduce the download time.
DIATHESIS consists of three lightweight, easily deployable
and highly configurable Web applications, namely the administration,
the documentation, and the querying applications, which allow
data import and monitoring, classification and indexing, and
search and presentation respectively.
DIATHESIS is currently being used for the archival, documentation
and promotion of three historical archives of the Vikelaia Municipal
Library of Heraklion, namely the archive of Newspapers and Magazines,
the Turkish Archive of Heraklion, and the Municipal Archive (“Archio
Dimogerontias”). In a first phase 500.000 pages have been
digitized and 20% have already been classified and indexed in
the system.
DIATHESIS is also being successfully used for the archival of
handwritten manuscripts of “Filekpedeftiki Etaireia”,
an educational nonprofit organization founded in 1836 in Greece.
The archival material concerns 10 volumes of minutes of the Board
of Directors and General Assembly meetings of the “Filekpedeftiki
Etaireia” since 1840.
Currently a new application for the archival, documentation and
promotion of the archives of a Greek newspaper is under way.
