Biblissima’s Choices of Tools and Methodology for Interoperability Purposes

Abstract

Biblissima (Bibliotheca bibliothecarum novissima) is a digital humanities project which aims to create a federated access point for approximately 40 partner databases dedicated to the history of manuscripts and early printed books, to their circulation and their readers, from the 8th to 18th centuries. These databases contain different data types and use different database systems, which are added complications when building a unique access point. This contribution will focus on the various challenges to be faced in standardising the data and achieving image interoperability, as well as on the technical solutions that have been adopted: choosing to define an ontology based on CIDOC-CRM and FRBRoo in order to encompass all the data types found in the partner databases, building a thesaurus for the concepts indexed in the databases (especially for scientifc terminology and iconographic descriptors) and an XML-TEI authority file for all non-concept data. The article will also present the tools and methods used to align different data types (people, corporate bodies, places, etc.) with international resources such as the Bibliothèque nationale de France authority file, VIAF, DBpedia and GeoNames, as well as the standards adopted for image interoperability and the scientific contributions that image annotation tolos based on IIIF standards can provide.