GENO, the Genetic Networks Ontology

Abstract

GENO, the Genetic Networks Ontology: Overview back to ToC

Classes

• Avant-textual witness
• Compositional phase resource
• Diary entry
• Documentation
• Endogenetic witness
• Exogenetic witness
• Expression
• Genetic dossier
• Genetic stage
• Marginalia
• Other material
• Post-editorial phase resource
• Pre-compositional phase resource
• Pre-publication phase resource
• Publication
• Publication part
• Witness
• Written Text

Object Properties

• dossier is part of dossier
• dossier is reused in dossier
• has genetic stage
• is after
• is before
• is member of dossier
• is part of publication
• is reused in dossier
• publication is reused in dossier
• publication part is reused in dossier
• results in publication
• results in publication part

Object properties hierarchy

Named Individuals

• clear copy
• draft
• final copy
• list
• plan
• proofs
• published item
• scenario
• sketch

GENO, the Genetic Networks Ontology: Description back to ToC

Background

Genetic criticism and authorial philology are fields of study dealing with the genesis of literary, and more in general textual, works. A genetic witness is a document bearing witness to the genesis of a work, such as a manuscript, a typescript, a proof, a printed copy, a digital file, etc. While the single genetic witness can be formally modelled using the standards developed by the Text Encoding Initiative (the text, the support, each phenomenon on the page), no standard is available so far for describing the witness as a genetic entity and in relation with other witnesses. GENO aims at filling this gap, by providing a model for describing networks of genetic witnesses, that can be called 'genetic networks'.

The following are two examples of genetic networks, taken from the Roud project (for which see below):

• a diary note taken on a small sheet of paper is copied on a notebook. The note is reused for writing a literary piece published in an article and the article is partially reused in a book;
• two articles of literary criticism are reused in the making of a preface to a book.

Entities

The main classes in GENO are geno:Witness, geno:Publication and geno:GeneticDossier.
The genetic dossier gathers all documents "that bear witness to the evolution of the work" (De Biasi 2004). It is a scholarly construct and not something instrinsic to the documents.
The classes geno:Publication and geno:Witness are two opposite poles in relation to the dossier: the dossier includes one or more witnesses and it results in a publication (or part of it) (Fig. 1).

Figure 1: The relationship between the witness, the dossier and the publication.

The relationships are slightly more complex when parts of publications should be considered separately (Fig. 2), as in the case for example of chapters with different genesis.

Figure 2: The relationship between the witness, the dossier, the publication and the publication part.

As a subclass of fabio:Expression, the publication is "a realization of a single work" (Davis and Newman 2005), but it is not a specific exemplar. When a publication is reused for a new writing project (e.g. a new edition or a new book), geno:Publication will have a link to the new dossier as geno:publicationIsReusedInDossier (or geno:publicationPartIsReusedInDossier). If there is a concrete document in which the original publication is reworked for the new project, for example an annotated exemplar of the publication (geno:PublishedItem), that document will be a witness belonging to the new dossier (Fig. 3).

Figure 3: Reuse of a publication for a new writing project.

In contrast to the publication, the witness is a concrete document. As a subclass of CRMtex:TX1_Written_Text, the witness is unique and characterised by the close relationship between the text and its support. Witnesses can be ordered chronologically using the properties geno:isBefore and geno:isAfter. In GENO, a witness can be further specified by its subclasses geno:Avant-textualWitness, geno:DiaryEntry, geno:Documentation, geno:Marginalia, geno:OtherMaterial. Based on these sub-classes, each witness belongs to the endogenesis or exogenesis (De Biasi 1996, De Biasi 2020): avant-textual witnesses and diary entries are considered as endogenetic witnesses, while documentation, marginalia and other materials as exogenetic witnesses (Fig. 4).

Figure 4: The witness, its subclasses and their distribution in endogenesis and exogenesis.

An avant-textual witness is also characterised by a genetic stage. GENO offers a number of named individuals of type geno:GeneticStage (clear copy, draft, final copy, list, plan, proofs, published item, scenario, sketch), but others might be added depending on the needs of the different projects.
Avant-textual witnesses can be organised in phases: pre-compositional, compositional, pre-publication, post-editorial (De Biasi 1996, Mahrer 2017). In GENO, the affiliation of a witness to one of the four phases is inferred based on its genetic stage: for example, a witness with the genetic stage 'list' will be a member of the pre-compositional phase. These generic rules might be customised for better representing specific genetic profiles.

Geno in use, competency questions and corresponding sparql queries

GENO is meant to be general enough to accommodate the needs of different projects. It is quite small and simple, because it only focuses on the materials from the point of view of the genetic status and relationships. GENO should be combined with other ontologies for describing bibliographic and archival resources.

The competency questions used to develop the ontology and the corresponding sparql queries are available together with two data samples, based on the Roud project and the Bernard Comment, “En mer” prototype.

GENO (previous versions: 0.1, 0.2) was originally created as part of the project « Gustave Roud. Œuvres complètes », the critical edition of the complete works of the Swiss author Gustave Roud (1897-1976), directed by D. Maggetti and C. Jaquier (University of Lausanne, 2017-2021).

Cite as

Ontology current version (1.0):

• Elena Spadini. GENO, the Genetic Network Ontology. Revision: 1.0. https://w3id.org/geno

Ontology previous versions:

• Christen, Alessio, and Elena Spadini. 2019. “Modeling Genetic Networks. Gustave Roud’s Œuvre, from Diary to Poetry Collections.” Umanistica Digitale 7. https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2532-8816/9063.

Visualisations of the Roud data, modelled with GENO:

• Pallacci, Valentina, Andrea Benedetti, Tommaso Elli, Elena Spadini, Michele Mauri, and Daniel Maggetti. 2022. “Visualizing the Genetic Process of Literary Works.” In AIUCD 2022 - Proceedings, edited by Fabio Ciracì, Giulia Miglietta, and Carola Gatto. Quaderni Di Umanistica Digitale. http://amsacta.unibo.it/6848/.
• Elli, Tommaso, Andrea Benedetti, Valentina Pallacci, Elena Spadini, and Michele Mauri. 2023. “Designing Network Visualizations for Genetic Literary Criticism.” Convergences - Journal of Research and Arts Education 16 (31): 25–38. https://doi.org/10.53681/c1514225187514391s.31.176.

Cross-reference for GENO, the Genetic Networks Ontology classes, object properties and data properties back to ToC

References back to ToC

Acknowledgments back to ToC

The authors would like to thank Silvio Peroni for developing LODE, a Live OWL Documentation Environment, which is used for representing the Cross Referencing Section of this document, as well as Graffoo, a graphical framework for OWL Ontologies; and Daniel Garijo for developing Widoco, the program used to create the template used in this documentation.