V. Mirzaee
Electronic versions of historical documents are traditionally limited in both the
representations they allow as well as the level of computational manipulation they
support. Most electronic documents have minimal advantages over their hard-copy printed counterparts: availability and keyword search.
In this work, we present a novel approach using ontologies to represent the semantic within the knowledge found in historical documents. Our main purpose is to examine the possibility of representing the knowledge found in a historical document in a manner that allows further computational manipulation than that provided by text or HTML documents. In order to do this we require a model where the representation of people, places, events and their relations are captured and understood at a computational level. It was of utmost importance to us to allow this information to be reused and shared amongst users as well.
Our implementation allowed us to get an overview of the general concepts in a historical document, relationships amongst these concepts and provided us with different methods for visualizing dynamic hierarchical structures of both governmental positions and geopolitical interdependencies. The user is able to get an insight as to what happens in any place, in relation to any person at any time. Additionally, this model captures the changes that these relations undergo throughout time (dynamicity). The temporal aspect of the knowledge we captured made our representation more accurate and realistic. Our implementation and the evaluation results are presented along with our proposed future work.
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