Ontology-based Representation and Reasoning about the History of Science

The use of ontologies enables semantically enriched access to a variety of digital resources. Historical domains impose a number of challenges to creating ontologies, e.g. modeling temporal relations, handling subjectivity, and dealing with vagueness. This research develops a case study in the History of Science that illustrates how to conceptualise and reason about a historical domain, and suggests an approach to modeling time and temporal relations. Based on existing methodologies for ontology construction, a methodology for conceptualising (a part of) the History of Science domain has been derived taking into account that the author has acted as both a domain expert and a knowledge engineer. Following the methodology, main concepts and relations in the History of Science have been identified. Special attention is paid at modeling temporal concepts and relations. A framework for conceptualising and reasoning about the History of Science is presented, combining Davidson’s theory of events to represent temporal categories and Allen’s interval logic to reason about temporal relations.