Transforming TEI Manuscript Descriptions into RDF Graphs

This paper reports on the transformation of the Bodleian Library’s online medieval manuscripts catalogue from XML documents into RDF graphs. The catalogue uses the “Manuscript Description” section of the TEI Guidelines to encode entries which were originally published in printed form, but also incorporates amendments and additions from unpublished documents. The transformation of this catalogue has required the development of processes to extract the relevant elements from the TEIXML documents, assemble these extracts into a new XML file, and match the various elements and attributes to CIDOC-CRM and FRBRoo entities and properties which can be expressed as RDF triples and incorporated into graph databases. As a result of this work, information from the manuscripts catalogue has been ingested into Linked Data graph databases developed by two Oxford projects: OXLOD (Oxford Linked Open Data) and MMM (Mapping Manuscript Migrations).