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Home Open Science Datasets Ancient Greek Oratory Ontology

Ontology · version 1.0

Ancient Greek Oratory Ontology

The legal proceedings of the Athenian courts.

Marble bust of Demosthenes in the Louvre Museum
Demosthenes, Louvre. Roman portrait after a Greek original. Eric Gaba (Sting) · CC BY-SA 2.5.

Locate a passage, inspect its legal concepts, and compare the features that define them. Each figure is calculated from the deposited RDF.

A concordance of the evidence

44 links connect 36 concepts to 38 distinct cited passages. Select a point to see what the same passage supports.

● Public branch ■ Private branch ◆ Shared or other category

Horizontal positions are ordered speech identifiers, not dates. Vertical axes show section numbers and use separate ranges. Antiphon’s compound numbering is retained. n counts distinct cited passages, not surviving speeches or historical trials.

Inspect any of the 39 concept records

One example field contains an unfinished placeholder; it is excluded from this concordance. Two further concepts have no example field. Original references are retained without silently correcting their attribution.

How similar are the proceedings?

A pairwise comparison of the 34 terminal concepts. Darker cells indicate more shared recorded features. Select a cell, or use the two menus, to inspect the calculation.

Jaccard similarity: J(A,B) = |A ∩ B| / |A ∪ B|. Features are RDF axis–value pairs for the initiating party, initiation, presiding body, trial body, summons and penalty assessment. Every pair has equal weight.

Ordering follows the private/public branches, then the English names. Numbers identify the same concepts on both axes. Missing features are not imputed. Sparse records and inherited features affect scores; similarity is not legal equivalence or historical frequency. Use arrow keys inside the matrix.

Which bodies appear in the proceedings?

Coverage of the 34 terminal concepts, grouped by presiding or trial body. Bar lengths show counts on a linear axis starting at zero.

Alternative bodies remain grouped as in the RDF. Unrecorded values are shown explicitly. Counts describe the ontology’s coverage, not the frequency of actual court cases.

Dataset Info
39Concepts
80Terms
36Concepts with usable citations
3,752Axioms

Overview

An ontology of court disputes represented in Attic oratory. Created by Rachel Milio for her PhD, it connects legal categories, terminology and ancient textual evidence.

Scope
Period coveredc. 419 – 323 BCE
RegionClassical Athens
Modelled asOntology
LanguagesEnglish, Ancient Greek
Built withTedi ontoTerminology Editor. See TEDI documentation
SourcesCorpus of Attic oratory; David D. Phillips, The Law of Ancient Athens
Access the data

Query it through the SPARQL endpoint using this named graph:

https://triplestore.talos-ai4ssh.uoc.gr:8890/datasets/Ancient-Oratory-v1

Ways in

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

Example queries

Ancient Greek terms and their recorded definitions

Filter terms by language. The tag belongs to the term: many definitions attached to Ancient Greek terms are written in English.

PREFIX rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#>
PREFIX otv: <http://www.ontologia.fr/OTB/otv#>
SELECT ?termName ?def
FROM <https://triplestore.talos-ai4ssh.uoc.gr:8890/datasets/Ancient-Oratory-v1>
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

Use en for English terms, or remove the filter for both languages. Each result represents a term with a recorded definition.

Related dataset: Legal Bodies in Classical Athens.

Size & structure
Concepts39
Terms80
Axioms3,752
Classes53
Individuals367
Object properties13
Subclass axioms246
Source notes

The RDF introduction describes legal bodies, while this record and its 39 concepts describe proceedings. Some Ancient Greek-tagged definitions are English. The damages-suit definition includes contradictory penalty wording. The page preserves the deposited classification and identifies these limitations.

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

Rachel MilioData curator
ORCID 0009-0000-0420-4711
Maria PapadopoulouSupervisor
ORCID 0000-0001-6451-8712
Christophe RocheSupervisor
ORCID 0000-0002-0756-0559

Department of Philology, University of Crete