Interacting with an Ontology to Explore Historical Domains

摘要

The use of ontologies enables semantically driven access to a variety of digital resources. In this paper, we illustrate how an ontology can be exploited to provide structured access to web-based resources. We present a case study in History of Science that illustrates how to conceptualise and reason about a historical domain by taking a systematic approach to modelling time and events, based on existing Artificial Intelligence theories. An initial web-based application has been implemented for exemplifying how an ontology can assist users to examine a historical conceptual space and to explore temporal relationships between scientific events.