Ontoterminology of Ancient Greek Garments

International audienceOur central research question is how to exploit textual, visual and material sources to broaden and deepen our understanding of the domain of ancient Greek dress. In answering this we used a highly interdisciplinary approach that brings together ontology engineering and linguistics and applies them to clas-sics, dress history, material culture and cultural heritage studies. In this paper we describe the building of the first multilingual ontoterminology of the do-main of ancient Greek garments, i.e. a terminology whose conceptual model is a formal ontology. For the modelling of the domain knowledge of ancient Greek dress we used Tedi (ontoTerminology editor), a new software environ-ment, compliant with semantic web standards, specifically catering to the needs of terminologists and cultural heritage specialists researching and/or making use of terminologies of their respective fields. In what follows we pre-sent the basic steps towards the definition of the concepts of the domain in a formal language (i.e. not in natural language) by means of specific axes of analysis. We aim for very finely structured knowledge which can eventually support two types of queries: by means of words, but also by means of ideas (concepts). The outcome is a multilingual set of consistently defined terms of the domain of ancient Greek dress. Our approach evidences the conceptual richness and complexity of this domain, while demonstrating the importance of having at the expert’s disposal specialized software for the representation of complex domain knowledge and terminology