Modelling and Structuring Narrative Historical Sources with Temporal Context

Abstract

Creating semantically well-structured data from various historical sources is a challenging task as its contents are quite complicated and less structured. Factoid Prosopography Ontology (FPO), a source-oriented data model for prosopography, tackles this problem and enables the knowledge representation of historical information. However, we highlight two issues that FPO does not sufficiently address. The first issue relates to the temporal expression. While FPO provides a way of attaching date or the date range to historical phenomena, it is based on absolute time information, which is not always given in historical sources. To overcome this, we introduce a way of expressing relative time information by describing a temporal sequence of events mentioned in sources. Second, the more important issue is how to describe the context for each entity mentioned in sources. This context information is not explicitly described in sources but plays an essential role in reading historical sources. For this, we introduced a new concept EntityInContext, which represents ‘an actor in certain context’ as a single Uniform Resource Indicator (URI), and an instance of EntityInContext is defined based on the events’ sequence described earlier. The validity of the model was clarified by creating actual data for Caesar's Bellum Gallicum and attempting a SPARQL search.