Thanks to the Anneliese Maier Research Award granted to Prof. Jean Winand by the Humboldt Foundation, the Department of Egyptology of the University of Liege, in collaboration with the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and the Saxon Academy of Sciences in Leipzig (Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae), is now developing Thot, a set of resources for documenting and encoding ancient Egyptian resources in a shared, interoperable approach. Moving towards Web Semantic and Linked Open Data, the resources that will be pushed online progressively will consist in a set of thesauri covering most of the metadata relating to ancient Egyptian texts and monuments, as well as a proposal for a TEI interchange format that enables exchange and sharing of textual data.
Thesauri
A first set of resources will consist in a wide range of multilingual thesauri related to documentary and textual metadata, aiming at providing controlled vocabularies and terms so that Egyptological projects with text and object focus will interoperate with each other in an easier way (read more).
TEI exchange format
Sharing digital textual resources is an actual challenge for scholars working on Ancient Egyptian-Coptic (3000 BC-1350 AD), mainly because of the different writing systems that have been used throughout the history of this language, and because of the diverging aims and scopes of the projects involved in creating annotated corpora of Ancient Egyptian-Coptic. In collaboration with several leading projects in this field, Thot is coordinating the definition of a XML/TEI interchange format in order to enable this data sharing (read more).