Multilingual online access to digitised Arabic manuscripts by using metadata.

AbstractThree millions of ancient Arabic manuscripts are scattered throughout the world. The online availability of this human heritage is more urgent than ever. The consultation of these resources poses technical and geographical problems. Digitisation and publication on the web provides some solutions - allowing many to consult these manuscripts and avoid the handling of the originals. But, how to give users access to these resources? The access by the content is a difficult problem. This is currently a challenge and it needs more time. Therefore, using a catalogue, described by a set of metadata, is a compelling solution for these resources access. But, which metadata to use for digitised ancient Arabic manuscripts cataloguing? What kind of online access model to set up? Our paper aims to give qualitative answers to these issues. Indeed, it deals with two fundamental aspects: firstly, we propose an original ancient Arabic manuscript cataloguing model, based on metadata and encoded in XML format. Secondly, we propose an efficient multilingual access model to these digitised resources by using the catalogue.