The Institute of Computational Linguistics (ILC) is historically in the
van with respect to methodologies and tools for text processing, in
particular for what concerns the area of "Digital Library for Social
Sciences".
One of the more interesting aspects of the Digital Library is represented
by the word 'integration', both in the already well-known sense
of 'multimedial integration' and in the sense of a fruitful co-operation
among the various approaches to texts.
In the last years, the digital acquisition of images started playing an
important role within textual philology and now this role is considered
strategic also relating to the development of digital libraries. There is
a growing interest for searching and developing software for making more
accessible the documentary and library heritage: the procedures for
textual processing - belonging to ILC - could be integrated in librarian
networks by associating the emerging functions for accessing texts
(images
and/or full text) to the traditional ones. In this respect, CIBIT -
Italian Digital Library and CIRCE (an European project for the management
of digital journals in collaboration with the Warburg Institute of London
and the University of Trento) could be quoted
The co-operation between computational linguistics and "Digital Library"
includes: techniques for terminology standardisation; languages for
creation of ontologies; implementation of thesauri by means of clustering
and statistical anlysis; definition of semantic areas, disambiguation of
polisemy, and retrieval cross-languages systems.
Since the launch of the Third Framework Programme of the European
Commission, ILC has been actively involved in developing systems for
analysing digital documents, to be used by papyrologists, epigraphists,
philologists. Some of these tools have a CNR patent, while others will be
used by industries.
New professions such as "computational philologist" and "digital
librarian" will emerge from this scenario, as foreseen in a recent
conference of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei and also as it emerges
from the programme of the next European Science Foundation Conference
which will take place in September 2003.
Through its participation to various projects launched by the Italian
Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali (Bibliophilo and FAD), ILC
is
giving the guidelines for the digital acquisition of relevant historical
and philological material to be used by experts of the field.
Focus