A Semantic Model for Historical Manuscripts

TL;DR

This paper introduces a semantic model for historical manuscripts that captures time-varying information and supports reasoning, aiding the study and publication of complex historical scientific texts.

Contribution

It presents the first interdisciplinary model for representing temporal statements and domain knowledge in historical manuscripts, with implementation techniques for semantic indexing and reasoning.

Findings

Model effectively represents time-varying statements.

Supports semantic indexing of manuscripts.

Enables temporal reasoning on extracted knowledge.

Abstract

The study and publication of historical scientific manuscripts are com- plex tasks that involve, among others, the explicit representation of the text mean- ings and reasoning on temporal entities. In this paper we present the first results of an interdisciplinary project dedicated to the study of Saussure's manuscripts. These results aim to fulfill requirements elaborated with Saussurean humanists. They comprise a model for the representation of time-varying statements and time-varying domain knowledge (in particular terminologies) as well as imple- mentation techniques for the semantic indexing of manuscripts and for temporal reasoning on knowledge extracted from the manuscripts.