A CIDOC CRM Extension for Historical Data Production and Interoperability (SDHSS): The Case of University History

Résumé En

Out of the need to conceptualise the reality in the world, and more specifically factual information, from the point of view of historical research, an extension of CIDOC CRM for semantic data for humanities and social sciences has been developed: Semantic Data for Humanities and Social Sciences (SDHSS) (https://ontome.net/project/8). The ontological commitment is therefore related to the domain of discourse of history but insofar as history, as a discipline that studies the life of humans and societies in the past, is interested in all the different aspects of social, economic, political, religious, literary and cultural life, the scope of this extension could be defined as the whole of social and human life, apprehended from the descriptive point of view, and global approach to reality, that characterises historical research.Inspiring previous work and literature, in addition to the modelling experience developed in the symogih.org project during more than 10 years and the robust object-oriented approach developed by the CIDOC CRM SIG, is the one accomplished in the Wonderweb European project which produced the DOLCE and DnS foundational ontologies. The general epistemological approach is inspired by the work of Evandro Agazzi about realist objectivity, distinguishing between things and scientific objects, and more or less recent developments in social sciences (sociology and social psychology) especially with regard to the fundamental notion of social representations and collective intentionality. These are the epistemological foundations of the top-level ontology proposed for factual information modelling as an integration of CIDOC CRM trying to comply as much as possible with its modelling principles and to harmonise with the existing classes and properties.The SDHSS CIDOC CRM extension is in fact an ecosystem of extensions, split into a top-level one (the present one) and different namespaces (each belonging to a subproject of the main one) in order to provide a more flexible development, and to allow the management of sub-domains of historical research, and eventually of other disciplines, by experts belonging to different research communities. In these namespaces, new classes and properties allow to clarify the modelling of the reality studied from the point of view of historical research intended in the general perspective outlined above.In this paper, after presenting the general view of the SDHSS ontology and the methodology on which it is based, I will apply it to the domain of University history and academic careers, in order to provide an example of application of the modelling methodology in the context of the planned conference. For doing this I will start from the classes and properties present in the symogih.org project concerning University history (cf. the http://siprojuris.symogih.org/ project) and the conceptualization proposed in the Early Modern Professorial Career Patterns Ontology (https://github.com/pcp-on-web/ontology). This will allow to test an integration of different conceptualizations, in order to provide data interoperability, and to identify open questions and issues that need to be solved.