R. Deswarte & J. Oosthoek
History is a very complex discipline consisting of characteristics common to other humanities disciplines as well as unique features. The success of a history ontology is entirely dependent on how well it incorporates and effectively maps these features. This paper will describe a number of these challenges and consider to what degree it is both possible and necessary to incorporate them in an ontology. This analysis will be from the perspective of the historian. First and foremost history is time dependent. The dating of historical facts, concepts and interpretations is crucial in history. However this dating is often unknown, uncertain or debated. The question of how to map imprecise time in an ontology is one important challenge. Further while many historical facts such as events and historical individuals may appear on the surface easy to categorise others including complex social categories such as class are not. Further how does one express relationships between such terms and categories and to what degree. Thus the complexity of history is problematic for an ontology builder. In addition historiography and historical interpretations are fundamental to the study of history and need to be incorporated in the ontology. This is not, as will be illustrated, a straightforward challenge. A further issue is the fact that historical terms are frequently imprecise, overlapping and vague. Other problems that will also be considered include authorship, provenance and document classification. After having described these fundamental challenges inherent in history, the paper will close with an indication of the degree to which these issues can or need be resolved based on the experience gained in constructing the VICODI history ontology. In other words it will consider the feasibility from the historical point of view of constructing a working history ontology.
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