HyperSchopenhauer: Philosophical Manuscripts on the WEB

HyperSchopenhauer is a general project aimed at the achievement of a digital critical edition of Arthur Schopenhauer's writings, starting from his manuscripts and pursuing with his printed works and documents (such as letters, biographical documents, marginal notes to books). The first aim of the project is to publish the manuscript remains conserved at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, most of them still unpublished, yet relevant to gain understanding of Schopenhauer's process of philosophizing and his sources.
The project is supported by the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MIUR) and by Pisa University, together with the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, but it gathers scholars and institutions from different European countries. It is built upon an Open Source web application ("Hyper") developed by Net7-Internet Open Solutions (Pisa) and by the "Hyper" team of Munich University, in the context of the EU COST action A32 "Open Scholarly Community on the Web" and "Discovery: Digital Semantic Corpora for virtual Research in Philosophy", a project supported by the EU commission under the eContentPlus program.
The HyperSchopenhauer technological infrastructure is conceived as a Semantic Digital Library application, that allows scholars to organize the digital objects according to multiple criteria (chronological, genetic and thematic) and to express the semantics of relations between digital objects in a machine readable way. It is based on Semantic Web standards for metadata and ontologies like OWL and RDF to ensure maximum interoperability.
The project foresees the digitization of the complete Berlin collection of Schopenhauer's manuscripts (in high resolution colored images), that's to say of approximately 12.000 manuscripts (the first 5.000 will be available to the public in January 2008), the classification and publication of the facsimiles in the HyperSchopenhauer (www.HyperSchopenhauer.org ), the transcription and codification of the manuscripts into a special HNML language. This transcription module, dealing with XML encoded transcription files, permits the generation of both diplomatic and linear transcriptions, presented to the reader side by side with a facsimile reproduction of the manuscript. Besides, Hyper integrates a publication workflow and a peer-review module for the publication of additional materials (essays, translations, bibliographies) submitted by scholars. Submitted materials are semantically linked to related digital objects, so that when a reader visualizes a manuscript he also views a list of all the transcriptions, essays and translations related to that manuscript.