Using an Ontology of Historical Events in Semantic Portals for Cultural Heritage
Eero Hyvönen, Olli Alm, Heini Kuittinen · 2007
We argue that an ontology of historical events is needed in semantic portals for cultural heritage due to three reasons. First, ontological identifiers (URIs) of events, such as the World War II or the coronation of Napoleon, are needed in order to make collection metadata mutually interoperable in terms of related events—in the same vein as identifiers are needed for identifying artifact types, persons, and geographic locations when annotating collection items. Second, events are of central importance in creating semantic links between cultural contents in applications such as recommendation systems. Third, historical events are important as content items of their own, forming the backbone of chronological histories.