The digital Gazetteer of Ancient Arabia: an example of reuse and exploitation of annotated textual corpora

This paper aims at presenting the results of the early adhesion to the principles afterwards codified as Open Science and FAIR principles in the frame of digital epigraphic projects in a niche area of research such as the pre-Islamic Arabian studies, to show how annotated corpora, provided that they adopt international standards and best practice, and expose data in an open format, have many more chances to be easily exploited and reused for different objectives than traditional, analogue corpora. The case study analysed in this paper is the Digital Archive for the Study of pre-Islamic Arabian inscriptions - DASI, an online annotated corpus of the textual sources from Ancient Arabia, which also exposes its records in standard formats (oai_dc, EpiDoc, EDM) in an OAI-PMH repository. The initiatives of reuse of DASI open data in the frame of the recently ANR-funded project MAPARABIA (CNRS-CNR) are discussed in the paper, focusing on the exploitation of DASI's onomastic and geographic data in a new reference tool, the Gazetteer of Ancient Arabia.