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Session 7: Ontologies and Data Modelling

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Gabriel Bodard edited this page Nov 22, 2016 · 23 revisions

Date: Thursday, November 10, 2016, 16h00 (UK time)

Session coordinators: Arianna Ciula (Roehampton University) and Charlotte Tupman (University of Exeter)

YouTube link: https://youtu.be/pRAT10sdsd8

Slides: http://goo.gl/5xTcWm

###Outline

This session will introduce:

  • The concept of an ontology as a special kind of data model;
  • The components of an ontological analysis to create and document such data models;
  • Some formalisms to express such ontologies;
  • The application of ontologies in digital classics and history.

In particular, the focus will be on the creation and use of explicit conceptual models for cultural heritage documentation (with particular reference to the core ontology CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model) as well as historical research. Emphasis will be put on the challenges of connecting document-level evidence with the conceptualisation of historical entities and with historical assertions and interpretations. Examples from specific projects will be discussed.

###Required reading

Pasin, Michele and Arianna Ciula. “Laying the Conceptual Foundations for Data Integration in the Humanities.” Proceedings of the Digital Humanities Conference (DH09), University of Maryland, USA June 2009 pp. 211-215.

Gill, Tony. “Building semantic bridges between museums, libraries and archives: The CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model.” First Monday 9.5 (May 2004).

###Further readings (Open Access)

Ciula, Arianna and Cristina Marras. “Circling around texts and language: towards pragmatic modelling in Digital Humanities.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 10.3 (2016)

CRMinf: the Argumentation Model, version 0.7 (February 2015). An Extension of CIDOC-CRM to support argumentation. Available: docx file, pdf file (650 Kb), rdfs file. See also http://new.cidoc-crm.org/crminf/home-4

Eide, Øyvind. “Ontologies, Data Modeling, and TEI”, Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative [Online], Issue 8 | December 2014 - December 2015. DOI: 10.4000/jtei.1191

Flanders, Julia and Fotis Jannidis (2015). Knowledge Organization and Data Modeling in the Humanities. [White Paper].

Jordanous, Anna, Mark Hedges, K. Faith Lawrence and Charlotte Tupman. “Exploring Manuscripts: Sharing Ancient Wisdoms across the Semantic Web” Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Web Intelligence, Mining and Semantics, Craiova, Romania (2012).

Kontiza, Kalliopi, Antonis Bikakis, Rob Miller. “Cognitive-based Visualization of Semantically Structured Cultural Heritage Data” CEUR Workshop Proceedings Volume 1456, pp. 61-68.

Oldman, Dominic and CRM Labs. CIDOC CRM Primer - version 1.2. Donna Kurtz (ed), August 2014.

Oldman, Dominic, Martin Doerr, Gerald de Jong, Barry Norton, Thomas Wikman. “Realizing Lessons of the Last 20 Years: A Manifesto for Data Provisioning & Aggregation Services for the Digital Humanities (A Position Paper).” D-Lib Magazine July/August 2014 Volume 20, Number7/8 doi:10.1045/july2014-oldman

Stead, Stephen. CIDOC-CRM Video Tutorial (2008) http://www.cidoc-crm.org/cidoc_tutorial/

###Further readings (not Open Access)

Ciula, Arianna and Øyvind Eide. Reflections on cultural heritage and digital humanities: modelling in practice and theory. In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Digital Access to Textual Cultural Heritage (DATeCH '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 35-41.

Ciula, Arianna, Paul Spence, and José Miguel Vieira. “Expressing Complex Associations in Medieval Historical Documents: The Henry III Fine Rolls Project.” Literary and Linguistic Computing 23.3 (2008): 311–25.

Pasin, Michele, and John Bradley. “Factoid-Based Prosopography and Computer Ontologies: Towards an Integrated Approach.” Literary and Linguistic Computing, June 29, 2013.

###Essay title

Using a concrete example of an historical or archeological source, reflect on the challenges of creating a conceptual model of its documentation record (e.g. a documentation file in a museum or in an archive) and/or of any relevant historical entities (e.g. people, places, events, concepts) referred to by the source.

###Practical exercise

(option 1)

  1. Open this page of the Hellespont Project (for the CIDOC mapping in this project see http://hellespont.dainst.org/startpage/docu.html#Hellespont-CIDOC-Mapping-and-ThucDb)
  2. Can you identify the types of historical entities modelled in this resource?
  3. What is their relationship to the text (e.g. do references in the texts and names in the map vary?)
  4. What can you say about the relevant conceptual model used to represent them (i.e. what aspects of the entities have been modelled?)
  5. Can you identify some examples of co-reference with other resources? What other resources are linked up via the Hellespont Project conceptual models of historical entities? What challenges does integration of different resources around supposedly the same historical entities pose?

(option 2)

  1. Based on the example shown in class concerning place names, a TEI xml file encoding information about a person according to the Text Encoding Initiative guidelines is provided here.
  2. Read the scope note for E21 person entity (p.13) of the CIDOC_CRM model - to inform the comparisons, you can look also at these two CIDOC-CRM visualisations for appellation and nationality.
  3. What you can say about the different way of conceptualising a person entity in these two models (TEI and CIDOC-CRM ontology)?
  4. What aspects of the TEI model can/can’t you express in the CIDOC-CRM one? What is gained and what is lost in the process?
  5. An expression of the person class in RDF (linearised as xml file) will be provided. Any more insights?
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