Corpus Constitution
AIKON uses a flexible data model to describe historical documents. This model distinguishes intellectual content from physical materiality, enabling researchers to map connections across scattered corpora.
Data Model Overview
AIKON's data model is inspired by CIDOC-CRM and FRBR standards.
It relies on six core entities:
- Work: the abstract intellectual production (ideas and content)
- Witness: a physical object preserved at a specific location
- Series: a group of witnesses sharing common coherence (e.g., volumes of an edition)
- Content: the manifestation of a work within a witness
- Digitization: digital representation attached to a witness
- Regions: image regions extracted from a digitization
Core database entities and their relationships, exemplified with the Encyclopédie of Diderot and D'Alembert.
Adding a Witness
A witness constitutes the basic unit of AIKON corpus. It represents a distinct physical document that is illustrated by one or several digitizations. Digitizations can be uploaded as PDF files, groups of images or IIIF manifests. The platform automatically converts them to IIIF manifests.