Structured Descriptions of Roles, Activities,and Procedures in the Roman Constitution

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how applying the Basic Formal Ontology to historical texts about the Roman Constitution can enable detailed, structured descriptions of roles, activities, and procedures, enhancing digital library exploration.

Contribution

It introduces a formal ontology-based approach to structure historical descriptions, specifically applying BFO to Roman constitutional entities and events.

Findings

Structured descriptions facilitate flexible exploration of historical texts.

Application of BFO enables detailed modeling of roles, activities, and procedures.

Supports development of richly-linked digital libraries.

Abstract

A highly structured description of entities and events in histories can support flexible exploration of those histories by users and, ultimately, support richly-linked full-text digital libraries. Here, we apply the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) to structure a passage about the Roman Constitution from Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Specifically, we consider the specification of Roles such as Consuls, Activities associated with those Roles, and Procedures for accomplishing those Activities.