PaleoCodage—Enhancing machine-readable cuneiform descriptions using a machine-readable paleographic encoding

This publication introduces PaleoCodage, a new machine-readable way to capture cuneiform paleographic shapes. Many different systems of listing and describing cuneiform signs exist, but none of the systems can be used to describe the shape, i.e. paleographic features of cuneiform signs. PaleoCodage aims to fill this missing link of description which can benefit the Semantic Web community of linked open data dictionaries, the assyrologist community in documenting signs and their variants and the cuneiform image recognition community in providing a gold standard encoding to match against. The publication evaluates the encoding on more than 200 Unicode cuneiform signs, describes already available application cases, a linked data vocabulary for paleography and concludes by describing future work on further validating PaleoCodage and applying the paleographic vocabulary to more languages.