Formal representation of socio-legal roles and functions for the description of history

Abstract

We propose a modeling approach for formal descriptions of historical material. In our previous work, we defined the formal structures of social entities such as roles, rights and obligations, activities, and processes which appear in the Roman Constitution, as an application of Basic Formal Ontology (BFO). In this paper, we extend that approach by incorporating aspects of the Information Artifact Ontology (IAO) and the emerging Document Acts Ontology (DAO). We use these to describe relationships among realizable entities (role and function), rights and obligations that are aligned to Socio-Legal Generically Dependent Continuants (SGDCs) of DAO, and activities as subtypes of directive information entity of IAO. Two examples are discussed: a passage from a digitized historical newspaper and a description of citizenship in ancient Rome.