SweoIG/TaskForces/CommunityProjects/HistoryBookForTomorrow

From W3C Wiki

Community Project

A History Book for Tomorrow

Adam Sobieski

1. Please provide a brief description of your proposed project.

I would like to explore the ways that events and documents can be interconnected, to work towards an ontology for relating events and documents that described events. This project includes an environment where historians would be able to compose and discuss their knowledge and the data would be obtainable through SPARQL.

2. Why did you select this particular project?

While more resources are available regarding the present, such an ontology will allow us to relate documents and events from the past as well creating an ever-improving historical resource for students. I'm interested in wikipedia, dbpedia and similar projects and I think the ontology described here could facilitate part of a structured knowledge encyclopedia.

3. Why do you think this project will have a wide impact?

Relating events and documents in meaningful ways, temporal relations, flavors of causality, and so forth, may allow users to navigate information in new ways. Additionally, software may be able to find interesting patterns in history.

4. Can your project be easily integrated with other wide-spread systems? If so, which and how?

I'm hopeful this project will work with numerous other projects including dbpedia and others in this present list.

5. Why is it that this project should be done right now, i.e. why should people prioritise this ahead of other projects?

Once a robust ontology is in place, people can start using it, possibly in wiki-based environments to record these relationships between documents and browse them. All the systems using the ontology will be interoperable.

6. What can you contribute to the project?

I'm a better programmer than ontologist so I can only offer C#/Java and working towards construction of a prototype environment.

7. What contribution would you need from others?

Ideas regarding an ontology. What are all the subtle ways historical events and documents containing them can relate to one another? What are the relationships between these relationships? I'm hoping we can come up with a useful initial ontology and allow historians to add to it, a sort of 'expert-driven wiki-ontology', and after that stabilizes we can go over it and solidify it. Example data here

8. What standardisation should the Semantic Web community at large undertake to support the project?

No standardisation required.

9. How does your project encourage others not currently involved with Semantic Web technologies to get involved (by providing data or make a coding commitment)?

In a wiki-environment as described, users would be providing structured data while using the resource.

10. What would be the main benefit of using Semantic Web technologies to achieve the goals of the project, compared to other technologies?

Interoperability, exporting and importing data.

Commitments

If you like this project, please write your name below and indicate what contribution you can make to the project.