Developing an ontology for the access to the contents of an archival fonds: the case of the Catasto Gregoriano
This work addresses the challenge of accessing and documenting archival data for historians and archivists, but it is incremental as it applies existing ontology methods to a specific dataset.
The research tackled the problem of making the archival contents of the Catasto Gregoriano more accessible by developing an ontology to structure and link the data, resulting in a system that meets Linked Open Data standards for improved usability.
The research was proposed to exploit and extend the relational and contextual nature of the information assets of the Catasto Gregoriano, kept at the Archivio di Stato in Rome. Developed within the MODEUS project (Making Open Data Effectively Usable), this study originates from the following key ideas of MODEUS: to require Open Data to be expressed in terms of an ontology, and to include such an ontology as a documentation of the data themselves. Thus, Open Data are naturally linked by means of the ontology, which meets the requirements of the Linked Open Data vision.