Ancient Greek Oratory Ontology

Overview

This ontology defines the primary legal proceedings of the Classical Athenian courts, where a proceeding is a court dispute between two litigants, for which a forensic speech would be written. That definition is the load-bearing decision: it ties the legal category directly to the surviving textual evidence, rather than modelling Athenian law in the abstract.

Scope

Access the data

Query it through the SPARQL endpoint using this named graph:

Ways in

• SPARQL endpoint: browser interface, no setup
• OTV Ontology Viewer: browse the class hierarchy
• RDF Graph Viewer: explore as a network
• Download the RDF/OWL and .otb files

The .otb file opens in TEDI; the .rdf file opens in Protégé, and can be visualised with WebVOWL.

Example queries

What are the Ancient Greek termsin the dataset and their definitions?

Every concept is denoted by one or more terms, and each term carries a language tag. Filtering on grc returns the Ancient Greek terms with their definitions — here, the legal vocabulary the orators themselves used.

PREFIX rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#>
PREFIX otv: <http://www.ontologia.fr/OTB/otv#>

SELECT ?termName ?def
WHERE {
  ?subject rdf:type otv:Concept.
  ?subject otv:denotedByTerm ?term.
  ?term    otv:termName       ?termName.
  ?term    otv:termDefinition ?def.
  ?term    otv:language       ?lg.
  FILTER (?lg = "grc")
}
ORDER BY ?termName

Swap the language code for en to get the English terms, or drop the filter to return every term in both languages, one row per language.

The same query works against Legal Bodies in Classical Athens, which uses the same vocabulary and covers the same period. Running it on both is the quickest way to see how the proceedings and the bodies that heard them divide between the two ontologies.

Size & structure

Citation & licence

Cite as

Milio, R., Papadopoulou, M., & Roche, C. (2024). 
Ancient Greek Oratory Ontology v.1.0 (Version 1.0) [Dataset].
Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13379144

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.13379144

Licence

CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Funding

European Commission, TALOS AI4SSH, grant agreement 101087269.

Credits

Department of Philology, University of Crete