Articles by Michael Eisner

“TreeTexT” is a formal language developed for describing the real objects (or monuments) of classical archaeology and history of art. It works with the “partitive” relation (i.e. between the whole, its parts and subparts) in order to permit the handling of complex objects such as Greek or Roman temples. A “thesaurus” allows to establish terminologies based upon the “generic” relation (i.e. between more or less explicit descriptors). A software package manages not only a specific textual retrieval at every described detail level of complex objects but also possibly related pictorial information.

The author describes new additional qualities of the program ARBOR which allow a less redundant object description and facilitate the setting up and the use of pictorial databases.

Archaeological knowledge can be formally divided into object and method knowledge. The former consists of the knowledge of the concrete nature of the individual research objects, and is based on analysis. The latter means the knowledge about how to evaluate the object knowledge with the help of interdisciplinary methods, and leads to historical knowledge as the synthesis. Object knowledge is based on individual observation, and method knowledge on comparison. ARBOR consists of a formal language able to represent textual object knowledge in a computer readable way. A PC-based implementation allows the retrieval on ARBOR-coded objects descriptions in different tree-structure-specific query-modes.