R. Deswarte & J. Oosthoek
While the number and range of existing ontologies has grown immensely over the past few years there are still relatively few open source history or even humanities ontologies or taxonomies. In addition there are at present neither accepted standards nor clearly defined guidelines for ontology building. It appears that existing ontologies have been both guided and restricted by existing ontology editors and systems such as CIDOC or KAON. This paper will approach the ontology building process from the perspective of a humanities subject specialist specifically the historian. It will identify and analyse a number of the key issues that must be addressed to create a working history ontology. It will explore themes such as top-down or bottom up building processes, sources and application driven approaches, reusability, mass uploading of instances and concept structures. The analysis of these issues will be considered with reference to the VICODI history ontology on which the authors worked and from which specific examples will be drawn. The paper will conclude with summations about the overall difficulties involved in building a history ontology and the possible uses for such ontologies.
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