Sinleqiunnini: Designing an Annotated Text Collection for Logo-Syllabic Writing Systems

Sophisticated writing systems, such as Cuneiform and Linear B, pose tremendous challenges for the development of digital corpora of annotated textual documents. The fact that both of them do not clearly represent the spoken form of the underlying languages, as well as the multi-level character of their logo-syllabic writing systems, has required the setting up of an ad hoc solution for complex data handling, aimed at capturing all of their features. While the usual approach of adapting a mark-up language would have been possible at least in principle, Sinleqiunnini relies on a different formal model, having been conceived from its beginning as a database driven framework. Such a solution was demonstrated to be more efficient than mark-up languages in representing parallel, overlapping hierarchies, while it also simplified prototyping of a set of complex queries to exploit the different information levels of these texts. Finally, it provided a more functional instrument to perform multi-user/multi-level annotation.