OpenITI MAKHZAN

OpenITI MAKHZAN: An Open Annotated Dataset of Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish, and Urdu Print and Manuscript Data

The Open Islamicate Texts Initiative (OpenITI) was founded in 2017 with the goal of building the digital infrastructure for the study of the premodern Islamic world. The underperformance of automatic transcription via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) for Arabic-script languages long stymied the production of large-scale corpora in Islamicate languages, such as Persian, Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, and Urdu.

The OpenITI MAKHZAN dataset is a large aggregation of Arabic-script ground truth and evaluation data drawn from a wide variety of Persian, Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, and Urdu print and handwritten (manuscript) documents.

Note on Release Numbering: Version 2025.1.2—where 2025 is the year of the release, the first dotted number—.1—is the ordinal release number in 2025, and the second dotted number—.2—is the overall release number; the first dotted number will reset every year, while the second one will continue on increasing.