An ontology of masters of the Babylonian Talmud

Abstract The purpose of this research is to build an ontology of the masters appearing in the Babylonian Talmud (BT). The ontology built so far has been shared as a Linked Open Data and it will be linked to existing vocabularies. This work has been developed in the context of the Babylonian Talmud Translation Project, where more than eighty Talmudists are working together, since 2012, at the translation (comprehensive of explicative notes and glossaries) of the Talmud into Italian. The construction of the resource has involved the application of tools leveraging on computational linguistics approaches. The ontology, already describing more than 500 masters, constitutes the first portion of a more comprehensive Talmudic Knowledge Base where the text itself, the terminology, the entities, and the concepts constituting the BT will be formalized and linked to each other.