Complex Entity Management Through EATS: The Case of the Gascon Rolls Project

Managing entities like people, places and subjects across a large corpus of textual documents can be complicated. While the TEI guidelines offer a sound basis for the encoding of a great variety of textual material, there does not seem to be a general agreement on how to manage information that goes beyond the text, like entity information and relationships between entities.

At the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London, past solutions for entity management have included the implementation of the following:

Simple XML authority files that contain basic information about all the entities in the corpus;

EAC files, where a file is created for each entity and linked from the texts using IDs;

Bespoke databases, that are very tied to a specific project and are not designed to be reusable;

RDF/OWL ontologies.#

But all of these seemed either to be too simplistic and hard to maintain, or too complicated for the requirements we had in the Gascon Rolls project.#

In this abstract we will demonstrate how we successfully applied the entity management tool EATS (Entity Authority Tool Set), in the context of this project, to successfully manage entity information