A digital library technology tool for ancient languages
The CHLT project focused on realising suitable infrastructure for the development of International Digital Library Technology (IDLT) and various IT applications for use within digital collections. The emphasis was placed on early modern Latin, classical Greek and Old Norse texts that constitute one of the cornerstones of the European cultural heritage. Part of project work involved the creation of advanced tools for working with and visualising digital documents including the VISHNU, a text documentation, visualisation and clustering tool. The tool features full text document indexing, collection building, keyword extraction, document search and retrieval as well as keyword-based document clustering. VISHNU also provides a set of interactive interfaces offering the user different visualisations for search results. After query submission, a structure is sought for definition within the retrieved documents which assists the user in document search. Moreover, this structure is used for resource discovery and discrete searching across a collection of writings. The VISHNU tool is highly suitable for non-experts in ancient languages, such as Ancient Greek, Latin and Old Norse. Since the tool allows searching in innovative ways and contributes to active understanding of texts, it can find useful applications in the education sector at secondary and higher levels. The software can also be employed in the field of multimedia information retrieval, particularly in the area of automatic image annotation and human-computer interaction research. In addition, current version of the visualisation tool can be extended to multimedia formats (audio-visual and video). Collaborations are also sought for multimedia information retrieval within Digital Library, Semantic Web and GRID environments for standards development.
