Semantic technologies for historical research: A survey

Abstract

Abstract. The diversity of sources of information for historical research fill a continuum between individual accounts transmitted for instance in letters but also in poems and songs, and aggregated statistical information as in the case of historical census. Historiography shares this heterogeneity and complexity of source material with other humanities fields. Methods to order this rich material, and by this ordering also to determine the way history is told are as old as history writing and vary among the different branches (or subdisciplines) of historical research.In this paper we focus on the work of historians, and even more specifically economic and social history.At the crossroad of information and historical sciences, so-called Historical Informatics or History and Computing emerged as a specific profession during the nineties of the last century. Together with computer scientists historians created a research agenda concentrating around questions how to create, design, enrich, edit, retrieve, analyze and present historical information with help of information technology. There exist a number problems and challenges in this field; some of them are closely related to semantics and meaning of knowledge in general. In this context, Semantic Web technologies can be applied in a number of situations, environments, applications of historical computing and historical information science. However, only a few number of contributions have yet considered these technologies. In this survey we present an overview of the past and present problems, challenges and advances of historical science computing, from out the perspective of Semantic technology.

Ontologies and historical archives: A way to tell new stories

“…In the last years, there is a remarkable interest in the application of Semantic Web technologies to history research both by Semantic Web researchers and historians, as documented by the survey reported in (Meroño-Peñuela et al, 2014). Many results considered in such a survey show the effectiveness of semantic formalisms (including ontologies), Linked Data best practices and NLP approaches in publishing and connecting historical datasets and in enhancing search, retrieval and classification.…”

What Is Linked Historical Data?

“…It is not difficult to see the benefits of publishing historical sources as Linked Open Data [7]. However, it is unclear whether standard Linked Data modeling and publication pipelines are suitable for historical sources.…”

A ‘historical case’ of Ontology-Based Data Access

“…Historical research has steadily been adopting semantic technologies [1], [2], [3] to tackle several recent problems in the field, such as making explicit the semantics contained in the historical sources, formalising them and linking them [4]. Historians, especially in Digital Humanities, are starting to use historical sources to aggregate information about history.…”