From Closed Platforms to Open Infrastructures: Agentic AI, Ontology, and Greek Textual Interpretation in Religious Studies

This paper proposes an open, ontology-driven, AI-mediated research environment for the study of Greek religious texts built from public-domain and openly licensed corpora rather than proprietary platforms. Using TEI/XML resources such as GLAUx, Open Greek & Latin, and Perseus/Scaife, the project explores whether agentic coding tools can automate corpus normalization, metadata reconciliation, citation alignment, hyperlink generation, ontology construction, and graph-based retrieval across biblical, early Christian, and related Greek materials. Unlike conventional search systems centered on keywords, lemmas, or fixed indices, the proposed environment supports relation-aware discovery, customizable semantic linking, and provenance-preserving exploration across corpora. Rather than treating AI as an autonomous interpreter, the paper argues that agentic systems function as infrastructural and hermeneutical assistants: they lower the cost of building open research environments and help scholars navigate, explain, and extend them while preserving human judgment as decisive.