Epitome

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

An epitome (Greek epitemnein—to cut short) is a summary or miniature form, also used as a synonym for embodiment.

Many lost documents from the Ancient Greek and Roman worlds survive now only "in epitome" referring to the practice of some later authors (epitomators) who wrote distilled versions of larger works now lost. Some writers attempted to convey the stance and spirit of the original, while others added further details or anecdotes regarding the general subject. As with all secondary historical sources, a different bias not present in the original may creep in.

Documents surviving in epitome differ from those surviving only as fragments quoted in later works, and those used as unacknowledged sources by later scholars, as they can stand as discrete documents, albeit refracted through the views of another author.

Examples of epitomes providing the only record of now lost works include:

John Xiphilinus' precis of the missing portions of Cassius Dio's History of Rome.
Justin's abridged version of the Philippic History by Gnaeus Pompeius Trogus, one of the main sources for the life of Alexander the Great.
the epitome of Book IV of Apollodorus of Athens' Bibliotheke or Library, a comprehensive encyclopedia of Greek mythology.

[edit] Computing

In computing, an epitome is a condensed digital representation of ordered datasets, such as matrices representing images, audio signals, videos, or genetic sequences. Although much smaller than the epitomized data, the epitome contains many of the smaller overlapping parts of the data with much less repetition and with some level of generalization. As such, it can be used for data mining and other machine learning and signal processing tasks. The first epitomic analysis was performed on image textures (http://www.research.microsoft.com/~jojic/epitome.html) and was used for image parsing. The epitome model has also been applied to videos (http://www.psi.toronto.edu/~vincent/videoepitome.html). Filling in missing parts of a video, removing objects from a scene and performing video super-resolution are examples of tasks in which the video epitome has proven useful. Epitomes are also being investigated as tools for rational vaccine design.