✖Here you can explore some general information about the project. See also Beta maṣāḥəft institutional web page. Select About to meet the project team and our partners. Visit the Guidelines section to learn about our encoding principles. The section Data contains the Linked Open Data information, and API the Application Programming Interface documentation for those who want to exchange data with the Beta maṣāḥǝft project. The Permalinks section documents the versioning and referencing earlier versions of each record.
Click to get back to the home page. Here you can find out more about the project team, the cooperating projects, and the contact information. You can also visit our institutional page. Find out more about our Encoding Guidelines. In this section our Linked Open Data principles are explained. Developers can find our Application Programming Interface documentation here. The page documents the use of permalinks by the project.
✖Descriptions of (predominantly) Christian manuscripts from Ethiopia and Eritrea are the core of the Beta maṣāḥǝft project. We (1) gradually encode descriptions from printed catalogues, beginning from the historical ones, (2) incorporate digital descriptions produced by other projects, adjusting them wherever possible, and (3) produce descriptions of previously unknown and/or uncatalogued manuscripts. The encoding follows the TEI XML standards (check our guidelines).
Shelf marks (full list)Manuscripts (search)List of Digitized ManuscriptsCatalogues EncodedInscriptions
✖We identify each unit of content in every manuscript. We consider any text with an independent circulation a work, with its own identification number within the Clavis Aethiopica (CAe). Parts of texts (e.g. chapters) without independent circulation (univocally identifiable by IDs assigned within the records) or recurrent motifs as well as documentary additional texts (identified as Narrative Units) are not part of the CAe. You can also check the list of different types of text titles or various Indexes available from the top menu.
Clavis Aethiopica (Works)Narrative UnitsStudies
The clavis is a repertory of all known works relevant for the Ethiopian and Eritrean tradition; the work being defined as any text with an independent circulation. Each work (as well as known recensions where applicable) receives a unique identifier in the Clavis Aethiopica (CAe). In the filter search offered here one can search for a work by its title, a keyword, a short quotation, but also directly by its CAe identifier - or, wherever known and provided, identifier used by other claves, including Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca (BHG), Clavis Patrum Graecorum (CPG), Clavis Coptica (CC), Clavis Apocryphorum Veteris Testamenti (CAVT), Clavis Apocryphorum Novi Testamenti (CANT), etc. The project additionally identifies Narrative Units to refer to text types, where no clavis identification is possible or necessary. Recurring motifs or also frequently documentary additiones are assigned a Narrative Unit ID, or thematically clearly demarkated passages from various recensions of a larger work. This list view shows the documentary collections encoded by the project Ethiopian Manuscript Archives (EMA) and its successor EthioChrisProcess - Christianization and religious interactions in Ethiopia (6th-13th century) : comparative approaches with Nubia and Egypt, which aim to edit the corpus of administrative acts of the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia, for medieval and modern periods. See also the list of documents contained in the additiones in the manuscripts described by the Beta maṣāḥǝft project . Works of interest to Ethiopian and Eritrean studies.
✖While encoding manuscripts, the project Beta maṣāḥǝft aims at creating an exhaustive repertory of art themes and techniques present in Ethiopian and Eritrean Christian tradition. See our encoding guidelines for details. Two types of searches for aspects of manuscript decoration are possible, the decorations filtered search and the general keyword search.
Index of decorationsArt KeywordsIlluminations
The filtered search for decorations, originally designed with Jacopo Gnisci, looks at decorations and their features only. The filters on the left are relative only to the selected features, reading the legends will help you to figure out what you can filter. For example you can search for all encoded decorations of a specific art theme, or search the encoded legends. If the decorations are present, but not encoded, you will not get them in the results. If an image is available, you will also find a thumbnail linking to the image viewer. [NB: The Index of Decorations currently often times out, we are sorry for the inconvenience.] You can search for particular motifs or aspects, including style, also through the keyword search. Just click on "Art keywords" and "Art themes" on the left to browse through the options. This is a short cut to a search for all those manuscripts which have miniatures of which we have images.
✖We create metadata for all places associated with the manuscript production and circulation as well as those mentioned in the texts used by the project. The encoding of places in Beta maṣāḥǝft will thus result in a Gazetteer of the Ethiopian tradition. We follow the principles established by Pleiades and lined out in the Syriaca.org TEI Manual and Schema for Historical Geography which allow us to distinguish between places, locations, and names of places. See also Help page fore more guidance.
PlacesRepositories
This tab offers a filtrable list of all available places. Geographical references of the type "land inhabited by people XXX" is encoded with the reference to the corresponding Ethnic unit (see below); ethnonyms, even those used in geographical contexts, do not appear in this list. Repositories are those locations where manuscripts encoded by the project are or used to be preserved. While they are encoded in the same way as all places are, the view offered is different, showing a list of manuscripts associated with the repository.
✖We create metadata for all persons (and groups of persons) associated with the manuscript production and circulation (rulers, religious authorities, scribes, donors, and commissioners) as well as those mentioned in the texts used by the project. The result will be a comprehensive Prosopography of the Ethiopian and Eritrean tradition. See also Help page for more guidance.
Persons and groupsEthnic units
We encode persons according to our Encoding Guidelines. The initial list was inherited from the Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, and there are still many inconsistencies that we are trying to gradually fix. We consider ethnonyms as a subcategory of personal names, even when many are often used in literary works in the context of the "land inhabited by **". The present list of records has been mostly inherited from the Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, and there are still many inconsistencies that we are trying to gradually fix.
✖This section collects some additional resources offered by the project. Select Bibliography to explore the references cited in the project records. The Indexes list different types of project records (persons, places, titles, keywords, etc). Visit Projects for information on partners that have input data directly in the Beta maṣāḥǝft database. Special ways of exploring the data are offered under Visualizations. Two applications were developed in cooperation with the project TraCES, the Gǝʿǝz Morphological Parser and the Online Lexicon Linguae Aethiopicae.
BibliographyIndexesProjectsVisualizationsGǝʿǝz Morphological ParserOnline Lexicon Linguae Aethiopicae
Help

You are looking at work in progress version of this website. For questions contact the dev team.

Hover on words to see search options.

Double-click to see morphological parsing.

Click on left pointing hands and arrows to load related items and click once more to view the result in a popup.

The base URI for the Linked Open Data is https://betamasaheft.eu/ and this is prefixed bm unless where the empty namespace is assumed to be the base url of the current call. Most of the Linked Open Data formats served by Beta maṣāḥǝft are served via RESTXQ modules and therefore are part of the APIs.

You can also access the data directly on GitHub via XPath search or in our SPARQL Endpoint.

All the IIIF data in JSON-LD should be following the International Image Interoperability Framework presentation API 2.0.

All the DTS data in JSON-LD should be following the Distributed Text Services draft.

These two will not be explained here in any further detail.

As this is a very experimental part there is no guarantee we are abiding to all the recommendations available. Any feedback on any of these calls and even on single triples is more then welcome.

VoID

We have several kinds of Linked Open Data produced for different purposes, always form the TEI data. The sets of triples available as response to the following calls, return VoID turtle RDF providing a description of the available resources.

Not for all resources the same Linked Open Data is available, and the VoID nodes will tell you what is available and in which format.

Pattern Example Explanation
https://betamasaheft.eu/api/void https://betamasaheft.eu/api/void

This call produces a VoID turtle set of RDF triples describing the general available linked data access point, the two main access points to the RDF, via SPARQL query returning JSON or XML results and the DTS and IIIF top requests, leading to JSON-LD representations of the collection of texts and images respectively.
https://betamasaheft.eu/api/void/{$id}

This call produces a VoID turtle set of RDF triples describing the linked data available for the selected top level resource in Beta maṣāḥǝft, divided by format of data. There is a void:Dataset with links to

  • the RDF graphs of each resource
  • the RDFa, which corresponds to the main page of the entity where some RDFa is embedded (the triples embedded in the /main html view might be not all those in the RDF+XML)
  • the JSON-LD APIs access point (IIIF and DTS)
  • the Turtle RDF (Pelagios)

Whereas all these resources will have their .xml source file linked and a series of available additional views as appropriate to each, Manuscripts and Works will also have their DTS collection access point and if images are available the IIIF manifest for the manuscript in question.

Manuscripts, Works, Places and Institutions might also have the Turtle Dataset, which contains in the case of Manuscripts and Works the annotations of place names in the case of Places and instutitions is the Pelagios Gazetteer interconnection format which is available following the Pelagios Cookbook instructions.

https://betamasaheft.eu/api/placeNames/void/ https://betamasaheft.eu/api/placeNames/void

This call returns a VoID file with all relevant annotations about place names present in Beta maṣāḥǝft and made available to Pelagios.

This includes some datasets of resources annotated elsewhere, with Hypothes.is and Recogito.

The Gazetteer is available as a static datadump, made at each release of the Beta maṣāḥǝft application and is available in one of the github repositories of the project

RDF

The RDF about Beta maṣāḥǝft resources contains a selection of statements using several common and special vocabularies. it is produced and updated exclusively from the source TEI, with a XSLT transformation

The ontology used for the description of the resources has been compound from existing ontologies and is a work in progress available here. It imports the LAWD ontology and SAWS ontology as well as the ad hoc created Syntaxe du Codex ontology, and it uses properties and classes in addition to those in these ontologies from the SNAP-DRGN ontology, the Pelagios cookbook, Syriaca.org and Pleiades Vocabularies.

Documentation produced from the same file with Protégé export OWLdoc function is published here https://betamasaheft.github.io/RDF/

A graph visualization is available via WebVOWL.

The sparql endpoint has a user interface at https://betamasaheft.eu/sparql

The following table should give you a shorter summary of what to expect in the data which does not replace the details given in the ontology but allows to use the data as the ontology is not complete.

All open annotation statements follow the OA style although superseded.

Class Example Description

all top classes

BAVet1 [RDF] [HTML]

The following properties are always present for main entities.

  • dc:licence
  • dcterms:source
  • foaf:homepage
  • crm:P48_has_preferred_identifier
  • dc:publisher
  • dcterms:isPartOf
  • one dc:language statament for each language used in the document
  • one dc:contributor statament for each contributor to the document (names as string, not URI at the moment)
  • one dcterms:bibliographicCitation for each bibliography entry, containing a string with the Zotero bm: prefixed tag for the entry in the EthioStudies library.
  • assignment to as many classes as dictated by each resource.
  • There might be a dc:temporal
  • At any level there might be generic dc:relation stataments
  • Any number of direct relations using the properties listed in the guidelines, expect for the SNAP-DRGN properties for which SNAP bonds are created.

Manuscript

BNFet32 [RDF] [HTML]

A Manuscript will have additionally

  • one crm:P1_is_identified_by for each main identifier of the resource (e.g. shelfmarks)
  • SdC:hasCertainty
  • bm:hasTotalLeaves
  • a crm:P43_has_dimensionfor each E54_Dimension with
    • crm:P2_has_type
    • crm:P90_has_value
    • crm:P91_has_unit
  • crm:P46_is_composed_of with a pointer to a URI for one of the materials in the Beta maṣāḥǝft vocabulary or in the EAGLE vocabularies
  • crm:P57_has_number_of_parts with the integer indicating the total main content items (things in the msitem class).
  • dcterms:hasPart for each constituent part of the manuscript description (hands, additions, quires, contents, decorations, layout features, etc.

Manuscript content item

BNFet32 msItem 1 [RDF] [HTML]

Each of the manuscript content items is in the msitem class and contains the following statments

  • dcterms:hasPart pointing to the URI of the abstract work entity it contains
  • crm:P57_has_number_of_parts with the integer indicating the total main content items (things in the msitem class). This will be 0 if no subcontent item is present
  • dcterms:hasPart for each constituent part of the manuscript description (hands, additions, quires, contents, decorations, layout features, etc.
  • the placement of the content, with a bm:hasLocus property linking to a Locus node which might have one or more of the following properties:
    • bm:locusFrom
    • bm:locusTo
    • bm:locusTarget
    • bm:locusLine
  • dc:language

Similarly structured are also the additions to the manuscripts.

Manuscript Parts, e.g. Quire

BAVet1 quire 1 [RDF] [HTML]

Each of the manuscript content items is in the msitem class and contains the following statments

  • the placement of the content, with a bm:hasLocus property linking to a Locus node which might have one or more of the following properties:
    • bm:locusFrom
    • bm:locusTo
    • bm:locusTarget
    • bm:locusLine
  • a crm:P43_has_dimensionfor each E54_Dimension with
    • crm:P2_has_type
    • crm:P90_has_value
    • crm:P91_has_unit

Text/Narrative Unit

LIT4252Prayer [RDF] [HTML]

A literary work will additionally have

  • as many dc:title statements as needed for each title
  • as many dc:source statements linking to manunscript or manuscript contents URIs as the declared witnesses of the text

Place/Institution

LOC3577Gondar [RDF] [HTML]

A place record will additionally contain when available

  • coordinates within geo:location/geo:lat and geo:location/geo:long
  • lawd:hasName with lawd:variantForm or lawd:primaryForm

Person

PRS10303Yekunno [RDF] [HTML]

a person RDF representation will additionally contain

  • foaf:name with language code for each recorded name and title
  • If available up to threecrm:P4_has_time_span within the classes for Birth, Death and Floruit.
  • snap:occupation

Beta maṣāḥǝft URIs policies

For an ID https://betamasaheft.eu/BNFet32 the HTML representation and human readable resource is https://betamasaheft.eu/manuscript/BNFet32/main and this is where a browser will point unless the RDF location is specified https://betamasaheft.eu/rdf/manuscripts/BNFet32.rdf or the ID is requested with header Accept set to application/rdf+xml in which case a graph centered at the requested URI will be produced. This is not the same set of RDF triples as in the file. https://betamasaheft.eu/rdf/manuscripts/BNFet32.rdf is a representation of all the information in the XML file which is present at the HTML page, directly derived from the same XML. The RDF graph centered at https://betamasaheft.eu/BNFet32 does not contain the triples specific to parts and instead contains statements made in other source XML files.

Because in Beta maṣāḥǝft the HTML views are comprehensive, the URIs of parts of a manuscript for example or annotation will point to the main page where they are presented.

Entity URI

Manuscript

https://betamasaheft.eu/BNFet32

Object types

https://betamasaheft.eu/Codex

Material

https://betamasaheft.eu/material/parchment

Role

https://betamasaheft.eu/role/emperor

Work

https://betamasaheft.eu/LIT4252Prayer

Person

https://betamasaheft.eu/PRS10303Yekunno

Place

https://betamasaheft.eu/LOC3577Gondar

Institution

https://betamasaheft.eu/INS0448HamaraN

Authority-file / Art Theme

https://betamasaheft.eu/AT1053HistoricalScene

https://betamasaheft.eu/angel

manuscript contents

https://betamasaheft.eu/BNFet32/msitem/ms_i1

manuscript additions

https://betamasaheft.eu/BNFet32/addition/a9

manuscript decorations

https://betamasaheft.eu/BNFet32/decoration/d3

manuscript quires

https://betamasaheft.eu/BAVet1/quire/q1

manuscript hands

https://betamasaheft.eu/BNFet32/hand/h1

manuscript layout specification

https://betamasaheft.eu/BNFet32/layout/layout1

Open Annotations

https://betamasaheft.eu/BNFet32/person/annotation/95

https://betamasaheft.eu/BNFet32/place/annotation/1

SNAP Bonds

https://betamasaheft.eu/bond/snap:GrandfatherOf-PRS1854Amdase

Syntaxe du Codex Units and Transformations

https://betamasaheft.eu/BAVcerulli37/UniProd/UniProd1

https://betamasaheft.eu/BAVcerulli37/transformation/tr1

Beta maṣāḥǝft properties

The list of properties actually used in the value of the attribute name for the element relation can be found here, in the guidelines page where the schema values are imported.

Some, like bm:hasRole, or bm:locusLine or bm:hasTotalLeaves are directly exported from the TEI and are thus not in the list of values for relations.

name domain range definition
bm:isAntigraphOf Manuscript Bibliographic Reference (a Zotero tag prefixed bm:)

the relation between a ms and the first printed edition of a text it contains
bm:hasTabot Person Place / Institution

This person has a Tābot at a location.
bm:hasBaptized

Person

 Person

This person baptized another one.
bm:baptizedBy

Person

 Person

This person was baptized by another one.
bm:isAuthorOfEthiopicTranslation

Person

 work

The subject of the relation is author of a translation of a work in another language and there is no digital resource enabling us to document the authorship of this work and the fact that the work as such is a translation of another work.
bm:isGoldenGospelof

Person

 work

The relation between a Golden Gospel and its original institution (even if the manuscript is now kept in a different place), to be used in cases where the definition of "Golden Gospel" is explicitly mentioned somewhere in the Gospel or when there is enough evidence that the Gospel is the main material repository of documentary texts related to a certain institution.

bm:hasLexiconEntry

Person / Place

Lexicon Linguae Aethiopicae Online lemma URI

Links a person record directly to the personal name entry for the names of this person in the Lexicon Linguae Aethiopicae Online.
bm:hasLexiconEntry

Person

 work

Links a person record directly to the personal name entry for the names of this person in the Lexicon Linguae Aethiopicae Online.
bm:isSuccessorOf

Person

 work

The subject of the relation is the successor of...
bm:isPredecessorOf

Person

 work

The subject of the relation is the predecessor of...
bm:hasLocus
  • bm:MScomponent
  • sdc:Unit
  • sdc:UniProd
  • bm:Document
  • sdc:Discontinuite

bm:Locus

Provides the placement in the manuscript of one of its units parts described features, might be used to locate a unit defined relationally. If stated, a further relation is needed with one of the properties defining the locus
bm:locusFrom

bm:Locus

foliation reference of the beginning of the placement

for example 1r
bm:locusTo

bm:Locus

foliation reference of the end placement

for example 2v
bm:locusTarget

bm:Locus

foliation reference for a feature or part on one or more non contiguous folia

1r, 14v, 56r
bm:locusLine

bm:Locus

the line in the foliatino reference

for example line 1 in column b of 1r
bm:hasRole Annotation

Role

assignes to an attestation of a name a role
bm:roleName Role

literal value of the role

The annotation will be about a role name assigned to a person, this will be as literal in this property
bm:roleType Role

literal from taxonomy

There is a limited number of types of role to be able to group them
bm:hasTotalLeaves Manuscript

integer number

the total of leaves of the manuscript
bm:husbandOf

Person

Person

husband of
bm:wifeOf

Person

Person

wife of
bm:motherInLawOf

Person

Person

is the mother of the legally conjugated partner
bm:fatherInLawOf

Person

Person

is the father of the legally conjugated partner
bm:sonInLawOf

Person

Person

is the husband of the daughter
bm:daugtherInLawOf

Person

Person

is the wife of the son
bm:sisterInLawOf

Person

Person

is the sister of the legally conjugated partner
bm:brotherInLawOf

Person

Person

is the brother of the legally conjugated partner
bm:ordainedBy

Person

Person

Ordained priest, bishop or monk. Same as Consecrated.
bm:hasOrdained

Person

Person

has ordained to a religious ministery

Beta maṣāḥǝft classes

name definition

bm:Locus

The placement of a unit, feature, part, component of a manuscript with reference to the foliation

bm:Role

The role attested with a personal name.

Syntaxe du Codex

This ontology is based on the book "La Syntaxe du Codex. Essai de codicologie structurale" by Patrick Andrist, Paul Canart and Marilena Maniaci, Turnhout: Brepols 2013. and Andrist, P. 2015. ‘Syntactical Description of Manuscripts’, in A. Bausi, P. G. Borbone, F. Briquel Chatonnet, P. Buzi, J. Gippert, C. Macé, M. Maniaci, Z. Melissakis, L. Parodi, W. Witakowski, and E. Sokolinski, eds, Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies: An Introduction (Hamburg: Tredition, 2015), 511–520.

The registered domain is https://w3id.org/sdc/ontology

The OWL file is stored in a GitHub repository of th Beta maṣāḥǝft organization.

Documentation produced from the same file with Protégé export OWLdoc function is published here https://betamasaheft.github.io/SyntaxeDuCodex/

A graph visualization is available via WebVOWL.