Il Gazetteer of Ancient Arabia
10.6092/issn.2532-8816/13681
I corpora annotati, a condizione che adottino standard internazionali ed espongano i dati in formato aperto, hanno molte più possibilità, rispetto ai corpora tradizionali e analogici, di essere riutilizzati per obiettivi diversi da quelli per cui sono stati concepiti. Il presente articolo intende presentare i risultati di una precoce adesione alle buone pratiche e ai principi successivamente codificati come Open Science e FAIR nell’ambito di progetti di corpora testuali digitali, specificamente in un campo di ricerca che possiamo definire di nicchia, ovvero l’epigrafia dell’Arabia preislamica. Il caso di studio analizzato in questo articolo è il Digital Archive for the Study of pre-Islamic Arabian inscriptions - DASI, un corpus online annotato delle fonti testuali dell’Arabia antica, che espone i suoi record anche in formati standard (oai_dc, EpiDoc, EDM) in un repository OAI-PMH. L’articolo presenta le iniziative di riuso dei dati onomastici e geografici di DASI in un nuovo strumento di reference, il Gazetteer of Ancient Arabia, sviluppato nel quadro del progetto Maparabia (CNRS-CNR) recentemente finanziato dall’ANR. Dopo un’introduzione ai progetti DASI e Maparabia, in cui sono esposti gli obiettivi del Gazetteer, l’articolo descrive il modello concettuale del suo database e il funzionamento del modulo di importazione dei dati da DASI. Il popolamento del Gazetteer, che implica anche una fase di inserimento e manipolazione dei dati, è esemplificato dal caso di studio del sito sudarabico di ‘Barāqish/Yathill’. Tale esperienza offre un’occasione per discutere delle limitazioni e delle opportunità di riutilizzo di dati e metadati testuali, e delle questioni relative alla sincronizzazione fra sistemi.
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The digital Gazetteer of Ancient Arabia
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2022-01-25
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Um. Dig.
Jérémie Schiettecatte
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10.6092/issn.2532-8816/13681
125
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The digital Gazetteer of Ancient Arabia: An example of reuse and exploitation of annotated textual corpora
https://umanisticadigitale.unibo.it/article/view/13681/13771
   Umanistica Digitale – ISSN: 2532-8816 – n. 11, 2021
A. De Santis, M. Gallo, I. Rossi, J. Schiettecatte – The digital Gazetteer of Ancient Arabia. An
example of reuse and exploitation of annotated textual corpora
DOI: http://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2532-8816/13681


The digital Gazetteer of Ancient Arabia. An example of reuse
       and exploitation of annotated textual corpora

           1
            Annamaria De Santis, 2Matteo Gallo, 3Irene Rossi, 4Jérémie Schiettecatte

                                         1
                                             Independent researcher, Italy
                                               2
                                                   Senior developer, Italy
                       3
                           CNR – Istituto di Scienze del Patrimonio Culturale, Italy
                            4
                                CNRS – UMR8167 Orient & Méditerranée, France
                                     1annamaria.desantis@unipi.it
                                             2matteogal@gmail.com
                                              3irene.rossi@cnr.it
                                    4jeremie.schiettecatte@cnrs.fr




       Abstract

Annotated corpora, provided that they adopt international standards and expose data in open
format, have many more chances to be easily exploited and reused for different objectives than
traditional, analogue corpora. This paper aims at presenting the results of the early adhesion to
best practices and principles afterward codified as Open Science and FAIR principles in the frame
of projects concerned with digital textual corpora, in a niche area of research such as the pre-
Islamic Arabian epigraphy. The case study analysed in this paper is the Digital Archive for the
Study of pre-Islamic Arabian inscriptions – DASI, an online annotated corpus of the textual
sources from Ancient Arabia, which also exposes its records in standard formats (oai_dc, EpiDoc,
EDM) in an OAI-PMH repository. The initiatives of reuse of DASI open data in the frame of
the recently ANR-funded project Maparabia (CNRS-CNR) are discussed in the paper, focusing
on the exploitation of DASI’s onomastic and geographic data in a new reference tool, the
Gazetteer of Ancient Arabia. After introducing DASI and Maparabia projects and highlighting
the objectives of the Gazetteer, the paper describes the conceptual model of its database and the
module importing data from DASI. The population of the Gazetteer, implying also a data entry
and manipulation phase, is exemplified by the case-study of the Ancient South Arabian place
‘Barāqish/Yathill’. Based on the above experience, limitations and opportunities of data reuse
and synchronisation issues between systems are discussed.
I corpora annotati, a condizione che adottino standard internazionali ed espongano i dati in
formato aperto, hanno molte più possibilità, rispetto ai corpora tradizionali e analogici, di essere
riutilizzati per obiettivi diversi da quelli per cui sono stati concepiti. Il presente articolo intende
presentare i risultati di una precoce adesione alle buone pratiche e ai principi successivamente
codificati come Open Science e FAIR nell’ambito di progetti di corpora testuali digitali,
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    Umanistica Digitale – ISSN: 2532-8816 – n. 11, 2021

specificamente in un campo di ricerca che possiamo definire di nicchia, ovvero l’epigrafia
dell’Arabia preislamica. Il caso di studio analizzato in questo articolo è il Digital Archive for the
Study of pre-Islamic Arabian inscriptions - DASI, un corpus online annotato delle fonti testuali
dell’Arabia antica, che espone i suoi record anche in formati standard (oai_dc, EpiDoc, EDM)
in un repository OAI-PMH. L’articolo presenta le iniziative di riuso dei dati onomastici e
geografici di DASI in un nuovo strumento di reference, il Gazetteer of Ancient Arabia, sviluppato
nel quadro del progetto Maparabia (CNRS-CNR) recentemente finanziato dall’ANR. Dopo
un’introduzione ai progetti DASI e Maparabia, in cui sono esposti gli obiettivi del Gazetteer,
l’articolo descrive il modello concettuale del suo database e il funzionamento del modulo di
importazione dei dati da DASI. Il popolamento del Gazetteer, che implica anche una fase di
inserimento e manipolazione dei dati, è esemplificato dal caso di studio del sito sudarabico di
‘Barāqish/Yathill’. Tale esperienza offre un’occasione per discutere delle limitazioni e delle
opportunità di riutilizzo di dati e metadati testuali, e delle questioni relative alla sincronizzazione
fra sistemi.



        Introduction

Building large, annotated textual corpora is hard-working, time consuming and expensive.
Moreover, work and skills gained by researchers committed to this activity are still scarcely
acknowledged by the academic community. However, annotated corpora, provided that they
adopt international standards and best practice, and expose data in open format, have many more
chances to be easily exploited and reused for different objectives than traditional, analogue
corpora ([4]). This paper illustrates this thesis by focusing on the potential of the open-access
archive of pre-Islamic Arabian inscriptions DASI, which is the main source of data for a different
and further reference tool, the Maparabia digital Gazetteer of Ancient Arabia.
The first part of the article presents the project Maparabia and the DASI archive. The central
paragraphs describe the Gazetteer system, i.e. its conceptual model and architecture, critically
discussing opportunities and limitations in the reuse of DASI data within the Gazetteer. The
case-study of the ancient South Arabian place of ‘Barāqish/Yathill’ exemplifies the functioning
of the tool and the choices operated in its design. The paper ends with a focus on the challenges
faced and the solutions devised in the synchronization of data between DASI and the Gazetteer. 1



        DASI archive: A source of onomastic and geographic data

Over the past years, considerable advancements have been made in the research on Ancient
Arabia, leading to the production of a mass of archaeological and textual data. The epigraphic
databases have played an outstanding role in disseminating this knowledge through the web


1   This article is the result of a joint effort of all the authors. Only for academic purposes, part 4 (The
    Gazetteer of Ancient Arabia) is specifically attributed to A. De Santis, and part 5 (Case-study:
    Barāqish/Yathill) to I. Rossi.
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                                       example of reuse and exploitation of annotated textual corpora

publication of tens of thousands of annotated inscriptions and graffiti, spanning 1,500 years of
history and covering a region that had long remained at the margins of the Near Eastern studies.
DASI - Digital Archive for the Study of pre-Islamic Arabian Inscriptions 2 is an online archive
publishing at present the curated edition of nearly 8,500 inscriptions from Ancient Arabia ([1]).
DASI corpus is for the most part made of the epigraphic heritage of the Ancient South Arabian
civilization, which flourished since the early 1st millennium BCE until the advent of Islam, in
the region corresponding to modern Yemen and neighbouring areas (the classical Arabia Felix)
([3]). The Ancient South Arabian textual heritage is composed by over 10,000 inscriptions and
graffiti, and hundreds of texts on wooden sticks ([11]).
The information encoded in DASI primarily regards the epigraphic texts. Annotation of the
textual phenomena is made according to the TEI-EpiDoc schema ([6]) in an XML encoding
module embedded into the database. In DASI, the textual annotation concerns transcriptional,
philological, and linguistic information – with a focus on onomastics. Names are essential
components of an epigraphic source as they provide direct information on individuals and
historical personalities, on the components of society, on divine figures, on places of the natural
and anthropic space, etc. Names, as well as lexicon and portions of text, can be searched for in
DASI website through the Textual Search tool. The Word List, a general index of the words, is
also automatically generated in DASI, allowing to list all lexical and onomastic occurrences.
Names can be classed by specific onomastic type (Figure 1). The Word List currently indexes
more than 7,000 name-forms, with a total of over 45,000 occurrences in the Ancient South
Arabian languages, comprising: personal names; divine names; names of months and decades;
names of objects; names of buildings; names of social, political, and geographical entities. The
latter two categories presently include about 3,300 names.




Figure 1: Summary of the occurrences of an onomastic item (yṯl) in the Corpus of Ancient South Arabian
Inscriptions within DASI.


2   DASI corpus is consultable through indexes and search tools at [http://dasi.cnr.it/]. DASI is the
    output of a five-year research project funded by the ERC from 2011 to 2016 (GA 269774; PI:
    Alessandra Avanzini, University of Pisa). It is currently maintained at the Consiglio Nazionale delle
    Ricerche.
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DASI epigraphic records are also provided with a series of textual and contextual metadata, such
as information on script and language, chronology, text genre, type of support and iconographic
elements, archaeological and geographical context. The sites that are places of provenance
(production or discovery) of the epigraphs are catalogued in specific records. More than 400 sites
are indexed in DASI, and provide information about: ancient and modern toponymy; location
(country, geographic area and present governorate, coordinates and related accuracy); types of
the findings, architectural structures and monuments; history and chronology; history of
research; kingdoms, languages, deities and tribes attested at that site; general description;
bibliography. Each site record may be linked to the other ones, thus representing the spatial
relations between them.



        The Maparabia project: Analysing and synthesising information
        related to the territory of Ancient Arabia

The opportunity to exploit and enhance this wealth of geographic data and of onomastics having
relation to a territory in Ancient Arabia, has occurred with the Maparabia project, 3 which aims
at developing tools for their analysis, producing syntheses, and making them both accessible to
the greatest number.
Based on archaeological data ([8]) and large epigraphic corpora (DASI, OCIANA), 4 the project
has three main milestones or research instruments, freely accessible online, and adhering to Open
Science and FAIR principles.
The first is a Digital Atlas of Ancient Arabia. This online platform is designed for the mapping
of monuments, inscriptions, languages, scripts, cults and social groups. It exposes data of a
geolocated database (PostgreSQL) of two types of entities: archaeological sites and inscriptions.
The archaeological data is compiled from the existing bibliography; the epigraphic data is
imported from the DASI corpus (about 7,200 South Arabian inscriptions at the moment) and
OCIANA (about 3,500 North Arabian inscriptions). The platform includes full web-GIS
functionality. Names of deities and tribes encoded in the DASI archive (see above) allow the
mapping of the distribution of cults and social groups. Any specialist wishing to carry out
advanced queries or spatial analyses may request access to the QGIS project and use the database
on open-source GIS software for his/her own research.


3   Maparabia is a 5-year project funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR-18-CE27-
    0015), which encompasses a variety of fields of research: history, archaeology, epigraphy, linguistics,
    palaeography, geomatics, and geography. The fifteen members of the project come from four
    laboratories dedicated to pre-Islamic Arabia: CNRS-Orient & Méditerranée (Paris), CNRS-
    Archéorient (Lyon), Dipartimento di Civiltà e Forme del Sapere of the University of Pisa, and CNR-
    ISPC (Milan) [http://www.orient-mediterranee.com/spip.php?article4002].
4   OCIANA - Online Corpus of the Inscriptions of Ancient North Arabia
    [http://krcfm.orient.ox.ac.uk/fmi/webd/ociana].
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                                       example of reuse and exploitation of annotated textual corpora

The second is a Thematic Dictionary of Ancient Arabia (TDAA). This is a comprehensive
electronic dictionary covering several aspects of the history, society, religion, linguistics and
topography of Arabia from the beginning of the first millennium BCE to the seventh century
CE. The treatment of its entries is based primarily on the consideration of epigraphic and
archaeological material, which in turn allows for an assessment of the reliability and historicity
of other sources, often considered distorted by distance (classical sources) or remoteness (Arab-
Islamic sources). In this respect, the TDAA is intended to meet the need for an up-to-date open-
access synthesis. The TDAA will benefit both specialists of Ancient Arabia, and the wider
academic community, by facilitating access to sources essential for the understanding of the
ancient world and the emergence of Islam.
The third is a Gazetteer of Ancient Arabia. The Gazetteer consists of a list of places, providing
their identification, description, and semantic relationships among them. The Gazetteer has been
conceived to provide a complementary, semantic approach to the GIS, as it better points out the
information about past geography provided by ancient texts, which is in the form of names, and
allows to express cultural phenomena, such as political and administrative entities, which are not
easily represented in their physical extension, and their numerous changes over time ([10]).
Moreover, as gazetteers enhance the name-based search of spatial information and the spatially-
oriented search of textual information on the web, which has a semantic organization, it is
expected to support the description, discovery, understanding, and process of data about Ancient
Arabia on the web ([9]). 5



        The Gazetteer of Ancient Arabia

The Gazetteer is designed to build upon several archaeological and geographical databases and
textual archives, which have joined the project Maparabia or expose their data under open
licenses. The aim is to organize and cross the information they include, and to stimulate study
and reflection on fundamental research topics of Ancient Arabia that concern territorial
dynamics, such as the settlement process and the man-environment relationship, and the socio-
political organization.

        Conceptual model and system architecture
The main entity of the Gazetteer of Ancient Arabia’s conceptual model is the Place (Figure 2).
The Maparabia Gazetteer adopts the definition of ‘place’ disseminated by the project Pleiades 6
([5]), therefore it takes into consideration elements of the natural and anthropic landscape, entire
settlements and individual artifacts, political, social and cultural entities related to the territory,

5   The Gazetteer of Ancient Arabia is not yet openly available. It will be made public from 2022
    onwards at [https://ancientarabia.huma-num.fr/gazetteer/]. Meanwhile, access to the database is
    allowed to authorized users at [http://ancientarabia.cnr.it/gazetteer].
6   See the technical documentation available on the Pleiades website
    [https://pleiades.stoa.org/help/concepts].
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‘whether or not exactly locatable, whether or not their actual relation with the real world can be
ascertained’. Each Place record identifies univocally and persistently an ancient place and is
related at least to one Location, that is its geographical expression, or one Name, that is its
onomastic occurrence in an ancient written source. The relation with a Location or alternately
to a Name is the condition of existence of a Place. A Place may have a physical or cultural-
historical relation with another Place, that can be also chronologically qualified. Relations
Location to Place, Place to Place and Place to Period are qualified by the degree of confidence of
the associations.
Locations may be provided with Bibliography. Names have a link with at least one Source which
witnesses its existence. This assumption, i.e. the acknowledgment of the source of a name, is
central to the model of this Gazetteer and marks the difference from other similar projects.




Figure 2: Conceptual model of the Gazetteer of Ancient Arabia.
The main source of place names of ancient Arabia, in particular of ancient South Arabia, is
undoubtedly the huge, local epigraphic heritage. As mentioned above, inscriptions – mainly the
‘monumental’ inscriptions – put great emphasis on detailing the names of elements of the
natural, anthropic, and social landscape, such as territories, mountains, rivers, settlements,
cultivated fields, hydraulic facilities, public monuments and private buildings (even single parts
or rooms of buildings), kingdoms, tribes and families.

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                                       example of reuse and exploitation of annotated textual corpora

Because of the availability of thousands of already annotated named entities and of data on
archaeological sites, the bulk of data is to be imported from different systems, above all DASI.
To this aim, the web application of the Gazetteer of Ancient Arabia includes a module importing
data from the DASI web APIs. On the other hand, a data entry module has been developed in
order to enrich with editorial content data already imported into the database and to include
information that has not yet been encoded. For instance, Names and Sources, in particular those
pertaining to the Arab-Islamic tradition, which are rarely available in digital format, can be added
through the data entry module. A module exporting data completes the system architecture,
allowing to expose Place records, being the other entities nested within, in JSON-LD format.

        Importing data from DASI
Records and portions of texts are the main elements extracted from DASI system, which is a
hybrid system (see the paragraph on the DASI archive, [2]). Prior to the import of data from
DASI, an accurate mapping of fields has been performed. Importing criteria are adjusted to the
type of Places occurring in DASI: archaeological site corresponding to an ancient settlement;
modern site not identifiable with a place mentioned in ancient sources; monument related to an
archaeological site; territorial entities mentioned in epigraphs.
As regards DASI records, the following ones are those imported into the Gazetteer:
•     Sites, mapped into the Location records. One Site corresponds to one Location, whereas
      Monuments related to Sites are mapped in separate Locations. Location items cannot be
      modified; therefore, users must perform changes to content in DASI and then run a new
      import work. One Place record is automatically created for each Location record; whereas
      the place type is filled out according to the mapping criteria (Table 1), the remaining
      fields must be enriched, as the automatic creation is aimed at the first population only.
•     Epigraphs, mapped into Source records. Each Name inherits the relation with the
      epigraphs which it occurs in. Sources are not editable, but new records can be added.
•     Periods are imported into the vocabulary of the same name. Furthermore, relations
      between Sources and Periods are automatically created, according to the chronology of
      the Epigraph records of DASI. Periods can be changed and added, and relations with
      Sources and Places can be multiplied, as many are the (historical, linguistic, cultural, etc.)
      parameters that can be taken into consideration when dating inscriptions and places.
      However, users have the task to verify the coherence of chronologies, so that relations are
      consistent.


 Place type                                          DASI Site / Name type
                                                     DASI Site > ancient name = unknown AND
 archaeological site
                                                     modern name ≠ unknown
 building <ancient>                                  Name type = building / sacred place

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 environmental element
                                                    DASI Site > ancient name = unknown AND
 geographic area <modern>                           modern name = unknown AND region ≠
                                                    unknown
 kingdom
 monument <modern>                                  DASI Site > monument
 settlement <ancient>                               DASI Site > ancient name ≠ unknown
                                                    Name type = tribe
 social / administrative entity <ancient>
                                                    Name type = nisbe
Table 1 Mapping of the Place type for automatic creation of Place records
As regards the textual elements, the Gazetteer retrieves items from the DASI Word List, limited
to those enclosed by <placeName><placeName> and <orgName></orgName> tags, plus the
<rs></rs> tag encoding the nisbe, i.e. the adjective describing a relation with territorial and/or
social entities (e.g. Roman, Italian, etc.). Each pair, onomastic item plus EpiDoc compliant tag
of the DASI Word List, is used to create one instance of the entity Name of the Gazetteer (Table
2). This inherits also the relation with the DASI epigraphic source it is attested in, just as Source
inherits the Period it is dated to in DASI.


 DASI EpiDoc compliant tag                              Name type
 <placeName></placeName>                                toponym
 <placeName type="sanctuary"></placeName>               sacred place
 <placeName type="building"></placeName>                building
 <rs type="nisbe"></rs>                                 nisbe
 <orgName type="tribe"></orgName>                       tribe
Table 2 Values of the field ‘name type’ populated from DASI



       Case-study: Barāqish/Yathill

The example of the place ‘Barāqish’, ancient yṯl (conventionally vocalised Yathill), illustrates the
conceptual model and the functioning of the Gazetteer’s data entry interface, as regards both the
manipulation of DASI-imported data and the addition of new information.




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                                      example of reuse and exploitation of annotated textual corpora

        Location
Barāqish, as an ancient South Arabian archaeological site located in north-western Yemen, is
described by a Site record in DASI [http://dasi.cnr.it/sit-243]. Data imported from this record
(country, coordinates, coordinates accuracy, type of site, structures, location and toponymy,
history of research, general description and chronology) and from the linked Bibliography
records of DASI, populate the Location record of the Gazetteer, that cannot be manipulated.

        Name
The ancient city of Yathill is mentioned as yṯl <placeName> in 25 Minaic inscriptions encoded
in DASI for a total of 30 occurrences, and in 11 Sabaic inscriptions for a total of 22 occurrences
(Figure 1, Figure 3).




Figure 3: List (partim) of the occurrences of the toponym yṯl, annotated as a <placeName>, in the Minaic
inscriptions.


Based on this toponym, the Gazetteer is automatically provided with a corresponding Name
record, which can be enriched in the Gazetteer with comments and information regarding the
language(s) of its occurrences, the accuracy and completeness of transcription, and links with
alternative appellations, such as different spellings of the name (Figure 4).
Name-to-Name relation
This is not the case of yṯl, but heterography frequently occurs in the Semitic inscriptions, for
instance in words with a long vowel (mater lectionis) which can be spelled in both their scriptio
plena and defectiva (e.g. Mrb vs Mryb for the ancient name of the Sabaean capital). Alternative
appellations are managed at the Name-to-Name relation level, in that the two Name records are
associated to each other as alternative names.



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Figure 4: Name record 'yṯl' in the Gazetteer, showing the relations with the Sources attesting the name.

        Source
For each inscription featuring at least one occurrence of the toponym yṯl, the Gazetteer is
automatically enriched with a Source record (e.g. Gr 326, Figure 5), deriving from DASI the
relations with the Names it attests, besides information such as the epigraphic siglum, the
chronology (Period) and the URI of the corresponding DASI record [http://dasi.cnr.it/csai-epi-
7547]. As one inscription may feature more than one onomastic item concerned with the
Gazetteer, each Source record in the Gazetteer is linked to the Name records of all the relevant
named entities its text contains. For instance, Gr 326 also mentions the toponym mʿn (modern
Maʿīn, the ancient capital of the Minaean kingdom also governing Yathill; see ‘Linked names’
in Figure 5).




Figure 5: Main tab of the Source record 'Gr 326' in the Gazetteer, linked to the Name record 'yṯl'.



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                                     example of reuse and exploitation of annotated textual corpora

       Period
Chronological information on each inscription is described by means of the Source’s relation
with one or more Period records (see Figure 5: ‘Periods’). These relations are imported from
DASI, where a chronological grid for the Ancient South Arabian corpora, organised in broad
periods, is applied to the inscriptions (Period ‘B’ roughly spans the second half of the first
millennium BCE). However, the Gazetteer also allows to manually enter new Period records and
to relate more than one Period to one Source. To the aims of the Gazetteer, this is useful for
instance when a source is datable to a narrower chronological range with respect to DASI grid’s
periods, or to a different periodization, especially if the Source record itself is not automatically
imported from DASI but created from scratch in the Gazetteer as in the case of Classical sources.

       New records
In fact, one essential feature of the Gazetteer is the possibility of entering new Name, Source and
Period records, besides those imported from DASI. This makes the Gazetteer an open system:
on the one hand it draws from an annotated corpus such as DASI all the already available
information, avoiding manual re-entering of data, but on the other hand it remains expandable
beyond the limits of its main source corpus. This allows to record the names of the geographical
entities comprised within the scope of the Maparabia Project, be they attested in further linguistic
corpora of inscriptions (from Arabia and beyond, e.g. Greek, Latin, Aramaic, North Arabian
etc.), or in other kinds of sources, above all Classical and Arab-Islamic literature. For instance, a
new Name record was created in the Gazetteer, dealing with Yathill’s Greek toponym Ἄθρουλα,
derived from Strabo’s Geography (16, 4, 24). The latter constitutes in its turn a newly entered
Source, assigned with a proper Period (1st century BCE).

       Place
As the archaeological site of Barāqish corresponds to the ancient city of Yathill, both the Location
and the Name records are connected to the Place Barāqish [Yathill]. Place is fully editable in the
Gazetteer, precisely because it is the main container of new information within the system. It
can be assigned one or more types (e.g. Barāqish is both an archaeological site and an ancient
settlement), it can be provided with external matches in the case it is recorded in other gazetteers
(e.g. Pleiades for the Ancient World: https://pleiades.stoa.org/places/39300), and it can be
textually described in order to summarise its main features (Figure 6).




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Figure 6: Main tab of the Place record 'Barāqish [Yathill]' in the Gazetteer.


Place-to-Name relation
By means of relations, the Place aggregates the other relevant kinds of data registered in the
Gazetteer, which complete its description. The link with one or more Location and Name
records can be enriched with information on the association certainty. Each Name carries the
assumed relation with the Sources it is mentioned in and, consequently, the Period of its
attestation, thus providing the complete spectrum of the variations in the onomastics of a given
Place, depending on the language and time of attestation.
One central challenge in the design phase of the system was the management of homograph
names in what concerns their relation to Places. Homograph names of sites and tribes are not
extremely frequent, but there is a considerable number of them even in the Ancient South
Arabian corpus alone. Homograph names of elements of the natural environment or of buildings
or sacred spaces are even more common. For instance, there is proof that there were at least two
sanctuaries of the god Almaqah named Awwam (ʾwm): one was the main Ancient South Arabian
confederal sanctuary in the surroundings of the capital Maʾrib, the other one was located in a
peripheral area of the Sabaean kingdom. Another example regards the several tribes named
Bakīlum: in order to distinguish among themselves, already in ancient times a specification
indicating the city of origin was sometimes added to the name bklm (e.g. bklm ḏ-mrymtm, the
‘Bakīlum of (the city of) Maryamatum’), but this is not always the case. Each pair ‘name-form +
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onomastic tag’ in DASI Word List is imported in the Gazetteer as a distinct Name; this means
that the same name-form which is marked-up by different tags (e.g. the toponym yṯl
<placeName> and the name of tribe yṯl <orgName type="tribe">, Figure 1) is treated as two
separate Name records. On the other hand, DASI mark-up does not disambiguate between
homograph names having the same tag; the identification of named entities is precisely one of
the aims of the Gazetteer. In order to do so, a functionality of the interface was implemented,
which allows to dissociate specific Sources of one Name in the latter’s relation with a Place, by
de-selecting the irrelevant Source entries (e.g. the inscription CIH 609 in Figure 7).




Figure 7: Management of Place-to-Name relations in the Gazetteer, with (de)selection of non-pertinent
Sources.


Place-to-Place relation
The relation Place-to-Place allows to draw links between ancient settlements having, for instance,
a relationship of geographic proximity; moreover, it records the ‘is part of/includes’ relationships
between a Place of type ‘archaeological site’ and a Place of type ‘monument’. This kind of relation
is especially relevant as most of these monuments are mentioned with their names in the
epigraphic sources, such as the temple of the god Nakraḥ in Barāqish, named Barān (brn) (Figure
8).
Another kind of Place-to-Place relation is the one between the Place of type ‘settlement’ and the
Place of type ‘social / administrative entities’. For instance, yṯl ‘Yathill’ (with its alternative name
ḏ yṯl meaning ‘the one of Yathill’) is also the appellation of the tribe (<orgName
type="tribe"></orgName>, Figure 1) based in the city of Yathill; therefore, a Name and a Place
records are created for this tribe. The Place record of the tribe yṯl / ḏ yṯl (type: social /
administrative entity) can be linked to the Place Barāqish [Yathill] (type: settlement) (Figure 8),
and to any further ancient settlements it might have been connected with.




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Figure 8: Management of Place-to-Place relations in the Gazetteer, including relations with Place-types
'monument' and 'social / administrative entity'.



        Issues in data reuse

The dependence from other repositories clearly underlines that the Gazetteer is conceived as a
tool of reuse, exploitation and enhancement of sources, in particular textual sources, already
digitized.

        Limitations and opportunities
Precisely the selection of the marked elements has brought out issues regarding the reuse of
encoded texts. According to the encoding criteria established for DASI, individual onomastic
elements can occur within onomastic groups: eponyms (<rs type="eponym"></rs>), compound
names (<rs type="complex"></rs>), nominal groups (<rs type="nominalGroup"></rs>), and
signatures (<seg type="signature"></seg>). DASI Word List indexes single onomastic elements
regardless of the onomastic groups they are embedded in. This poses problems, in particular, in
compound names whose aim is to define unique onomastic entities without distinguishing single
components.
There is a scientific issue, underlying this problem, that has no solution in itself. The objective
of DASI project, indeed, was the achievement of the digital edition of the pre-Islamic Arabian
epigraphic heritage. Moreover, the linguistic study of the inscriptions has been one main aim of


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the encoding process since the first phases of the project, going back to the end of the 1990s. 7
The Gazetteer, instead, intends to exploit those digital editions for specific research aims, one of
them being the study of ancient toponyms. Since no encoding work can envisage an unlimited
set of phenomena to be codified for any possible future use, technical solutions must be devised.
For instance, the site in Saudi Arabia now called Qaryat al-Fāw received several appellations in
the Ancient South Arabian inscriptions, all to be referred to the same place:
•     qryt: <placeName>qryt</placeName>
•     qrytm: <placeName>qrytm</placeName>
•     qryt ṭlw, probably to be interpreted as ‘Qaryat the Red’: <rs type="complex"><placeName
      n="1">qryt</placeName> <placeName n="2">ṭlw</placeName></rs>
•     qrytm ḏt khlm, lit. ‘Qaryat that of Kahl’ (Kahl being the local god): <rs
      type="complex"><placeName n="1">qrytm</placeName> <placeName
      n="2">ḏt</placeName> <placeName n="3">khlm</placeName></rs>.

This results in qryt, qrytm, ḏt, khlm and ṭlw being indexed as separate onomastic items
corresponding to each of the <placeName> elements in DASI Word List, 8 and would therefore
generate separate Name records in the Gazetteer. While this processing of words was based on
DASI’s interest towards linguistic annotation, the Gazetteer has the different objective of
identifying and disambiguating the geographic/territorial entities designated by specific names,
thus associating the names qryt, qryt ṭlw, qrytm and qrytm ḏt khlm with one single Place entity.
To overcome this idiosyncrasy between the two systems, the Gazetteer import module has been
designed so that compound names including <placeName></placeName> and
<orgName></orgName> tags are reconstructed and mapped into Name records. After a survey
of the compound names encoded, a set of conditions the import module must check have been
established. Since each text is considered a sort of matrix and each word has a position defined
by the intersection between a line and a column, only onomastic elements that comply with all
of them are aggregated in a compound name:
•     they are attested in the same inscription,
•     at the same line


7   The focus on the linguistic description of the texts and the pioneering venture of the project in the
    realm of the digitization of Ancient Arabian epigraphy informed the choices made in the original
    encoding of the onomastic phenomena. This has sometimes brought about legacy issues with which it
    was not always possible to cope within the scope of DASI project. For a detailed description of DASI
    encoding and the discussion of such limitations, see [2].
8   Going into deeper detail, the occurrences of the entry (word-form) qryt in the Word List are grouped
    into sub-entries: one described as a ‘toponym’ (for the occurrences of qryt alone) and one as a
    ‘toponym, first position in compound name’ (for qryt ṭlw, and potentially for any other compound
    toponym having qryt as its first element). The case of qrytm ḏt khlm is even more complex, as one of
    its <placeName> elements, namely ḏt, also occurs in other toponyms, such as ḏt ġylm (modern Hajar
    Ibn Ḥumayd in Yemen).
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•    in linear sequence (order of the occurrence)
•    they belong to the same name type
•    they are placed on consecutive columns (except for clitics that have the same position of
     the word they are connected to).

       Synchronization issues
The Gazetteer architecture, in that it depends from a different system, has raised also
synchronization issues. More generally, synchronization and versioning are issues to be faced
when reusing data.
The Maparabia gazetteer has a one-direction synchronization: changes to contents in the
Gazetteer do not turn back to DASI, whereas any change to DASI may cause updates in the
Gazetteer, by addiction or rewriting, in particular to editable fields. The choice of not simply
exporting data from DASI into the Gazetteer una tantum, but of synchronizing the two systems
is due to the consideration that DASI, which is the base source of the Gazetteer’s data, is not a
closed project: not only are corpora constantly updated with new epigraphic material, but
editions are also corrected on the basis of improved readings and new linguistic and cultural
interpretations. We deemed it essential that the evolving life of DASI data could implement the
Gazetteer, in order to make of it an always up-to-date tool.
In order to achieve this goal, the Gazetteer keeps tracks of the updates to the contents and allows
to control the results of the import works, by excluding records from updates. There is no proper
control panel, but this is distributed among the sections corresponding to the Gazetteer entities.
Indeed, each section is provided with a list of previews that users can filter and browse by sync
status. The list is updated when an import work is accomplished and shows changes that were
performed on DASI and are likely to affect contents of the Gazetteer: creation and deletion of
onomastic items of the Word List and Site records, but also modifications that cause changes in
Names, Locations and their relations; creation and deletion of Epigraph records that affect
Sources; amendments to the encoded texts that modify occurrences of onomastics; creation,
modification and deletion of Periods.
This display method replaces notifications. Moreover, changes are finally transferred into the
Gazetteer, only after a manual validation is carried out. Each record preview is provided with a
circle, the icon that represents the sync status, and a button to be clicked for validation. The
colors of the circle are codified according to the sync status:
•    green: a new record was created in DASI and has just been imported into the Gazetteer.
     Users, once the record itself is checked and possible relations are evaluated, are invited to
     validate import. Thus, the circle becomes empty
•    red: the record has been deleted in DASI, but is still present in the Gazetteer. Once users
     have checked its relations, it can be definitively deleted by the basket icon
•    blue: the corresponding record in DASI has been recently updated. Users are required to
     take note and validate the update; afterward the blue circle becomes empty
•    empty circle: no action is required.

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Users have therefore active role: since no change becomes permanent without their intervention,
they are stimulated to enrich contents by integrating Name files, creating new Places and
relations among entities.
Not only records are provided with sync status. The relation Name to Source, namely the
occurrences of names in a particular inscription, are subject to synchronization: if even one of
the occurrences is modified, the overall status changes according to the color codification above.
Validation, however, is not required. It is aimed only at drawing the attention to changes and
their potential consequences.
For instance, if a new inscription attesting ns2n <toponym> (the ancient name of the site of as-
Sawdāʾ in northern Yemen, conventionally vocalized Nashshān) is added in DASI, an import
work will create a new Source record (green) in the Gazetteer for that inscription. As the Name
record ns2n <toponym> was already present in the Gazetteer because it is already attested from
other sources, it will appear in the list of Names provided with a blue circle (Figure 9): this
indicates that a synchronization change has happened to the Name record.




Figure 9: Example of change in the circular icons’ colours, reflecting synchronization updates.


This change precisely regards the addition of a new Name-to-Source relation, which will be
indicated by a green circle in the ‘Sources’ tab of the ns2n <toponym> Name record; the ‘old’
(i.e. already approved) Name to Source relations feature an empty circle instead (cf. e.g. Figure
4). The user is called to validate the changes by means of the dedicated button. The addition of
Sources has also consequences with respect to the Place-to-Name relation, as the user has to
confirm that the name-form in that specific Source is correctly attributed to that Place (the
automatic selection being disabled because of potential homograph Names; cf. Figure 7).
If, instead, one of the ‘old’ Name-to-Source relations is broken because, on the basis of a new
reading or interpretation, the spelling of the only one occurrence of the toponym in a specific
inscription is changed (e.g. from the toponym [… n]s2n to the nisbe [… ʾs2]s2n ‘the
Nashshānites’), the Name-to-Source relation will feature a red circle. If that Source features
instead further occurrences of ns2n <toponym>, the circle will be blue.
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Finally, if a name is only known by one occurrence in one DASI inscription (i.e. the Name
record is linked to only one Source) and the name-form is changed in (or the name is completely
deleted from) that inscription, not only the Name-to-Source relation will be displayed in red,
but also the Name record itself. If the Gazetteer user agrees with such editorial changes in DASI,
after having deleted the relevant relations between records, he/she will be also able to delete the
Name record in the Gazetteer.



       Conclusions

In conclusion, if the historical and cultural domain of the Maparabia Gazetteer – i.e. Ancient
Arabia – is its main peculiarity, its added value, compared to the other gazetteers of the ancient
world, is the direct and ‘living’ bond with the annotated epigraphic corpus providing it with the
direct sources of ancient toponymy. The core data of the Gazetteer results automatically from
the mass digitization of the direct written heritage of pre-Islamic Arabia conducted during the
DASI project, according to guidelines that have established themselves as proper ‘standards’ in
the digital epigraphy field, and applying the best practices that were subsequently formalized
under the label of FAIR principles ([13]). DASI records, provided with URIs, are exposed in
standard formats (oai_dc, EpiDoc, EDM) in an OAI-PMH repository, thus allowing different
projects to access and use its data.
Standards and best practices that were observed have ensured the effective and easy reuse of texts,
even though the scientific objectives of the Gazetteer are significantly different from the original
purpose of the digitization and scope of use of the digital edition. Imported data can be enriched
in the Gazetteer with additional details arising from the thorough study of the sources and the
effort to systematize identification and relations. The instances of the main entity Place, in fact,
are the only ones that must be created from scratch, requiring the editorial intervention to
disambiguate, identify and circumscribe an ancient ‘place’. As well as the creation of the relation
Place to Place, this is the step of the workflow the scientific reflection focuses on, and the editorial
responsibility is more significant.
The export module of the Gazetteer allows to expose Place records, being the other entities nested
within, in JSON-LD format. Each Place item is identified with a URI and is released under open
license. This is consistent with the philosophy that has allowed the Gazetteer itself to be created
and is expected to increase dissemination through aggregation and linking with further
gazetteers, and therefore with archaeological, textual and geographic data, pertaining to different
chronological and cultural contexts ([7];[12]).



       Acknowledgements

The research leading to this paper received funding by the French National Research Agency in
the frame of the project Maparabia (ANR-18-CE27-0015, PI J. Schiettecatte, 2019-23). We
wish to acknowledge the contribution of Dr. Alessandra Lombardi to the records of the Gazetteer
of Ancient Arabia pertaining to the case-study described in this article.
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