Chapter 7 HISTORICAL ONTOLOGIES

Abstract: Static ontologies cannot capture the relevant contextual knowledge required for search and retrieval of historical documents because the entities in the world and the relations among them change over time. This demands that information represented in the ontology is temporally contextualized and that relations among entities that are relevant during different temporal intervals are available to support user queries. Furthermore, it is necessary to account for the fact that the course of the ontology’s evolution and the processes that have effected it are a part of the knowledge that should be brought to bear on the analysis of information at any given time. This chapter outlines a model for historical ontologies that is intended to meet these requirements. 1