Building the Seshat Ontology for a Global History Databank

Abstract

Abstract. This paper describes OWL ontology re-engineering from the wikibased social science codebook (thesaurus) developed by the Seshat: Global History Databank. The ontology describes human history as a set of over 1500 time series variables and supports variable uncertainty, temporal scoping, annotations and bibliographic references. The ontology was developed to transition from traditional social science data collection and storage techniques to an RDF-based approach. RDF supports automated generation of high usability data entry and validation tools, data quality management, incorporation of facts from the web of data and management of the data curation lifecycle.This ontology re-engineering exercise identified several pitfalls in modelling social science codebooks with semantic web technologies; provided insights into the practical application of OWL to complex, real-world modelling challenges; and has enabled the construction of new, RDF-based tools to support the large-scale Seshat data curation effort. The Seshat ontology is an exemplar of a set of ontology design patterns for modelling unncertainty or temporal bounds in standard RDF. Thus the paper provides guidance for deploying RDF in the social sciences. Within Seshat, OWL-based data quality management will assure the data is suitable for statistical analysis. Publication of Seshat as highquality, linked open data will enable other researchers to build on it.

Coding culture: challenges and recommendations for comparative cultural databases

“…Western Zhou, 1122–771 BCE) functioning as the units of analysis. The Seshat team has also published explicit discussions of how coding rubrics were constructed, what questions they are intended to answer, and how uncertainty concerning codings is to be incorporated (|Brennan et al, 2016 ; Peregrine et al, 2018 ).…”

An evaluation of uplift mapping languages

“…This international project led by the Evolution Institute (USA) and the University of Oxford is developing a knowledge base to describe human societies over the last 15,000 years as a set of time series. This knowledge base is structured according to a social sciences "codebook" or schema specified by an editorial board of domain experts in structured natural language and re-engineered into an OWL ontology by knowledge engineers at Trinity College Dublin (Brennan et al, 2016). The codebook specifies over 1,000 data variables of interest cover topics such as social complexity measures, warfare, technology, ritual and so on.…”