An Ontology for Western Saharan Manuscripts

International audience As more efforts are performed to digitize Western Saharan manuscripts, for preserving the memory they represent, the need to be able to work on these digitized materials naturally grows. Beyond cataloguing, an ontology is the basis to provide to researchers new tools for retrieving and integrating these knowledge sources. In this paper, we present an ontology describing West-Saharan manuscripts. We first precise the domain and the purposes, then we illustrate each step of the ontology's building, from experts and local resources to its alignment with well-established reference ontologies, including its automatic enrichment from existing thesaurus. This incremental process may be reused in other projects.