Applying and developing semantic web technologies for exploiting a corpus in history of science: The case study of the Henri Poincaré correspondence

Abstract

The Henri Poincaré correspondence is a corpus of letters sent and received by this mathematician. The edition of this correspondence is a long-term project begun during the 1990s. Since 1999, a website is devoted to publish online this correspondence with digitized letters. In 2017, it has been decided to reforge this website using Omeka S. This content management system offers useful services but some user needs have led to the development of an RDFS infrastructure associated to it. Approximate and explained searches are managed thanks to SPARQL query transformations. A prototype for efficient RDF annotation of this corpus (and similar corpora) has been designed and implemented. This article deals with these three research issues and how they are addressed.

Assisting the RDF Annotation of a Digital Humanities Corpus Using Case-Based Reasoning

“…This ontology is aligned with the use of several standard vocabularies (dcterms, bibo, rel, etc.). Three sparql querying modes have been created and are available on the website [7]. The classical mode requires to directly write sparql queries.…”

The Laborious Cleaning: Acquiring and Transforming 19th-Century Epistolary Metadata

“…[2] Although this paper describes and discusses the processing of Finnish epistolary metadata (or metadata that has ended up in the Finnish archives and museums), we believe that our experiences may have wider significance. In Europe, there are several digital humanities projects that harvest well-curated metadata (detailed information about senders, recipients, dates, and places) from edited letter collections -like Europeana 1 [3], Kalliope Catalogue 2 , The Catalogus Epistularum Neerlandicarum 3 , Electronic Enlightenment 4 , ePistolarium 5 [4], SKILLNET 6 , correspSearch 7 , the Mapping the Republic of Letters project 8 , NorKorr -Norwegian Correspondences and Linked Open Data [5], and Early Modern Letters Online (EMLO) 9 [6,7,8]. Bruneau et al discuss applying Semantic Web Technologies to modelling the correspondences of French scientist Henri Poincaré and publishing on an online portal 10 [9].…”