Francesca Tomasi
Silvio Peroni
Marilena Daquino
The Historical Context Ontology (HiCO) is an OWL 2 DL ontology developed for representing the context of a claim. In particular, it addresses features characterising hermeneutical activities performed by scholars while generating new information (i.e. an interpretation act). It allows to represent and reason on reliability of argumentations around attributions, by evaluating features such as motivations, types of cited sources or criteria, dates, relations with other claims (e.g. agreement/disagreement). Specifically, historical context regards events and situations that are part of the life-cycle of cultural heritage objects. For instance, "being created by somebody", or "being created at a certain time", are events related to an artefact that are claimed by an agent at a certain time, motivated with usage of primary sources, and recorded in a secondary source (e.g. a cataloguing record). HiCO extends the PROV Ontology (http://www.w3.org/ns/prov) with terms for describing aspects of the hermeneutical activity, and reuses existing ontologies, such as CiTO Ontology (http://purl.org/spar/cito/) for linking attributions to related sources.
The Historical Context Ontology (HiCO)
hico
The hermeneutical activity performed by an agent in order to generate new information (e.g. an artwork attribution).
Interpretation Act
The criterion or type of source used by an agent to support an interpretation act, such as bibliography, verbal communication, etc.
Interpretation Criterion
An arbitrary definition of the interpretation act, such as artowork attribution or date attribution.
Interpretation Type
A property relating an interpretation act to a criterion or type of source used to support the claim.
has interpretation criterion
A property relating an interpretation act to an individual defining an arbitrary classification of the interpretation.
has interpretation type
A property relating an interpretation act to the source where from the claim has been extracted.
is extracted from
agrees with
cites as evidence
disagrees with
refutes
Expression
A property relating statements to an interpretation act.
was generated by
Activity
A property relating an interpretation act to the time that triggered the activity.
started at time
was influenced by