HHT: An Ontology to Represent Territorial Dynamics for Digital Humanities

Abstract

The notion of territory plays a major role in human and social sciences as it allows to anchor in a spatio-temporal context the facts studied in humanities. Representation of territories as spatio-temporal entities has been tackled in various ways. However, approaches for an historical context are scarce, as most approaches are designed for either a contemporaneous or case specific use. Notably, most ontologies used to represent territories are focused on spatial representation and do not intend to ecompass the impact of actors over said space, which happens to be a defining dimension of territories in humanities. In order to represent historical territories, we proposed a new version of the previously conceived HHT ontology (Hierarchical Historical Territory) to represent hierarchical historical territories and include actors representation. The resulting ontology encompasses the description of evolving territories, territorial divisions, explicit change representation, the will of actors to change established characteristics of territories and allows to represent territories without having to know their geometry by relying on a notion of building blocks to replace polygonal geometry.