Fontes Civitatis Ratisponensis (FCR) II

The method called "Integrated Computer-Supported Editing" was developed to combine reliable techniques in scholarly editing with recent information technologies. The goal of the method is the support of interdisciplinary work and the transparency of a widely defined editing process by formal methods: rule-based automating procedures and the application of the editors` special knowledge. The physical representation of editorial information systems has to provide for the producer`s and the user`s view: On the one hand an expert system represents a virtual archive of original sources for any content-based analysis, on the other hand data are migrated to multi-media based and easily usable application system following the prevailing "industrial standards". For these reasons all the entities to be documented are represented in several levels, following an iteractive process of research, where all transformations from the facsimiles to the revised texts should be automated as far as possible. Besides that the external and internal features of the sources their tradition is to be documented, accompanied by representations of declarative and procedural knowledge. Therefore advanced data base applications and knowledge representations are combined to an integrated information system, which can be accessed and/or migrated in different ways for three clearly defined basic user groups: Casual user access a (static) WWW-system which provides for an elaborated interface and Java-based search facilities. An assistant-driven CGI-interface will satisfy the requirements of the advanced users; the expert user can get access to the released parts of the virtual archive individually. The ICE-method is concretely realized and will be extended by a project called "Fontes Civitatis Ratisponensis (FCR)", carried out in co-operation between a research institute, a city archive and a consortium for software development. This name stands for the exemplary edition of the medieval records of Ratispone (Germany) as well as for a concept of synergetic co-operation between archivists, historians, exponents of the historical basic disciplines and information scientists for the preservation and documentation of the written cultural heritage. Local computers and/or net worked systems are used as a carrier for the documentation of highly structured sources and Web-based facsimile editions. To reach as many potential interested parties as possible, the performance of the WWW versions has to be offered to them by CDROMs, too.