Projects

TALOS AI4SSH brought an ERA Chair in artificial intelligence to the University of Crete, with the aim of building lasting capacity for AI research in the social sciences and humanities.

The work is organised around research themes running in parallel: semantic annotation of text, classifying and naming objects, corpus analysis, and the digitalisation and datafication of education.

The laboratory itself was founded by publication in the Official Greek Government Gazette (FEK 4617B/07-08-2024), which also approved its operational regulation, making it the permanent institutional form of what began as a fixed-term project.

Outputs so far

• Seven ontologies and ontoterminologies, each deposited with a DOI
• Seven semantic tools, from an ontoterminology editor to a public SPARQL endpoint
• Membership of OPERAS, the European infrastructure for open scholarly communication

Diogenes Laertius, writing in the early third century AD, left the Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers: the richest surviving account of who the Greek philosophers were, who taught whom, and what they held. PhiloGraphia turns that text into a knowledge graph. The name joins philosophy, graph and the suffix -ia, echoing philosophia.

Laertius suits the treatment unusually well. He wrote to a consistent format, presenting each life the same way, so a single schema fits the whole work. And the structure a graph needs is already there: birthplaces, teachers, pupils, schools, doctrines, and his own remarks on who influenced, echoed or disagreed with whom.

Entities	Philosophers · schools of thought · concepts and doctrines · places
Relationships	Studied under · founded or belonged to a school · originated from · proposed a doctrine · connections between doctrines

What it can answer

Published as open data, the graph is also a teaching resource: an interactive way into ancient philosophy for students on the Digital Humanities Short Programme, open to undergraduates at the University of Crete since September 2023.

SemeiaCarta: the platform

PhiloGraphia is delivered through SemeiaCarta, an application for publishing and exploring biographical knowledge graphs. The project currently has two live editions: one based on Diogenes Laertius and one based on Cornelius Nepos.