STOLE: A Reference Ontology for Historical Research Documents

Historical documents are a relevant part of cultural heritage. It is well-established that this domain is very complex: data are often heterogeneous, semantically rich, and highly interlinked. For this reason, searching and linking them with related contents represents a challenging task. The use of Semantic Web technologies can provide innovative methods for more effective search and retrieval operations. In this paper we present stole, a reference ontology that provides a vocabulary of terms and relations that model the history of Italian public administration’ domain. stole can be considered a first step towards the development of a knowledge exchange standard on this specific domain. 1 Context and Motivation Historical texts and documents are considered an important component of cultural heritage. Among other sources, historical newspapers and journals archived in libraries represent a valuable source of information for historians. In the last years, several portals and digital libraries in the cultural heritage field have been enhanced with Semantic Web (SW) technologies in order to implement methods for more effective search and retrieval operations. In fact, they can offer effective solutions about design and implementation of user-friendly ways to access and query content and meta-data – see [11] for a survey in the historical research domain. The use of SW technologies can improve the productivity of research in historical domain, since they help to identify implicit and explicit knowledge included in the documents, e.g., reference to a historical person contained in a historical source can be discovered and related to other entities, for example events in which that person has been involved in. One of the main elements of the SW infrastructure are ontologies. They provide a shared and clear representation for a specific domain and they may play a major role in supporting knowledge extraction, knowledge discovery, and data integration processes. An ontology is usually defined as a formal specification of domain knowledge conceptualization. A Knowledge Base (KB) is composed of two elements, i.e., a Terminological Box (TBox) and an Assertional Box (ABox). The TBox represents the intensional knowledge of the KB and it is made up of classes of data and relations among them. In the following, we use the terms TBox and ontology interchangeably to denote the conceptual part of a KB. The ABox contains extensional knowledge, which is specific to the individuals of the domain. In this paper we present stole, a reference ontology that provides a vocabulary of terms and relations with which it is possible to model the history of Italian public administration’ domain. stole represents a first step towards the development of a knowledge exchange standard on this specific domain. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that ontological modeling has been undertaken for this specific domain. The paper is organized as follows: in Section 2 we describe the specific case study that motivated this research. In Section 3 we present the stole ontology and its design process. This ontology is built on an extended version of stole [1]. We conclude the paper in Section 4 by identifying stimulating directions and challenging issues for continued and future research in this application domain.