A knowledge-based framework for events representation and reuse from historical archives

Abstract

Thanks to the digitization techniques, historical archives become source of a considerable amount of biographical, factual and geographical data, that need to be structured in order to be usable in higher-level applications. In this paper we present the project of an ontology-based framework aimed at formally representing and extracting historical events from archives; this process should serve to the purpose of (semi)-automatically building narratives that allow users to explore the archives themselves. This proposal refers to a Ph.D. research at early stage and is part of a wider project, Harlock’900, established between the Computer Science department of the University of Turin and the Istituto Gramsci, a cultural foundation promoting research in contemporary history.