VedaWeb

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Nikolaus Himmelmann, since 3/2019; Professor Dr. Daniel Kölligan; Dr. Claes Neuefeind, since 3/2018; Professor Dr. Patrick Sahle
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages ; Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics
• Term: from 2017 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 329358806

The aim of the project is a web-based, open-access research environment called VedaWeb for linguistic research on ancient Indian texts. The text corpus will be made available together with a complete morphological annotation, and both text and annotations will be made searchable by lexicographical and corpus linguistic criteria. The goal is to make the VedaWeb the central research platform for the international scientific community working with ancient Indian primary texts. The development of the VedaWeb will serve to merge and expand the existing research resources on Old Indic texts existing in Cologne and worldwide. It is thus a consolidation of existing e-research-technologies. The foundation of the project is a complete morphological annotation of the pilot text, the Rigveda, the earliest and most important text of ancient Indian literature. The text and the annotations are stored in a database. Building on these existing data, a platform will be developed, which is intended to provide services for the end user, which so far are unavailable on other web-based platforms. These include a combined search by lemmas, word forms, morphological and metrical information, linking to the standard dictionary on this text by Hermann Grassmann (1873), a display of the translations of the text by Grassmann, Geldner and Griffith and commentaries (Oldenberg), and the possibility of exporting text sections together with morphological annotations by user-selected criteria. A central part of the project is the combination of the pilot text Rigveda with the Sanskrit lexicon web-site based in Cologne (http://www.sanskrit-lexicon.uni-koeln.de), the world's central site for the lexicography of Old Indic. All word forms of the text will be linked to the respective lemmas of Grassmann's dictionary that is already available online on the Cologne web-site. This will enable users to search in both directions, i.e. from the text to the dictionary and vice versa. In addition, the integration of the text into the web-site will provide the possibility to search the other Sanskrit dictionaries via the interface Cologne Digital Sanskrit Dictionaries. Furthermore, depending on philological preference, further texts to be fed into the site in the future will be linked with the most appropriate dictionaries. The development of the search interfaces of the Digital Sanskrit Dictionaries Cologne will provide search functionality in all dictionaries of the platform. By offering an unprecedented combination of services, VedaWeb will be a research platform that will allow new research on ancient Indian texts that so far was impossible or could only be achieved with great effort.

• DFG Programme: Research data and software (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
• International Connection: Switzerland, USA
• Co-Investigators: Mihail Atanassov; Dr. Gioele Barabucci; Jonathan Blumtritt; Martina Gödel; Felix Rau; Professor Dr. Kevin Ryan; Salvatore Scarlata; Professor Dr. Paul Widmer
• Cooperation Partners: Dr. Dieter Gunkel; Professor Dr. Laurent Romary; Professor Dr. Kevin Ryan; Salvatore Scarlata; Professor Dr. Paul Widmer
• Ehemalige Antragstellerinnen / Ehemalige Antragsteller: Professorin Dr. Uta Reinöhl, until 2/2019; Professor Dr. Jürgen Rolshoven, until 2/2018