Towards Semantic Interoperability in Historical Research: Documenting Research Data and Knowledge with Synthesis

TL;DR

This paper introduces Synthesis, a web-based, standards-driven documentation system that enhances collaborative historical research by improving data interoperability, extensibility, and reuse beyond traditional spreadsheets and databases.

Contribution

It presents a novel, standards-based system for semantic interoperability in historical data documentation, addressing key limitations of current practices.

Findings

Successful deployment with many historians in Art History research.

Improved data sharing and integration capabilities.

Enhanced long-term validity and reusability of research data.

Abstract

A vast area of research in historical science concerns the documentation and study of artefacts and related evidence. Current practice mostly uses spreadsheets or simple relational databases to organise the information as rows with multiple columns of related attributes. This form offers itself for data analysis and scholarly interpretation, however it also poses problems including i) the difficulty for collaborative but controlled documentation by a large number of users, ii) the lack of representation of the details from which the documented relations are inferred, iii) the difficulty to extend the underlying data structures as well as to combine and integrate data from multiple and diverse information sources, and iv) the limitation to reuse the data beyond the context of a particular research activity. To support historians to cope with these problems, in this paper we describe the Synthesis documentation system and its use by a large number of historians in the context of an ongoing research project in the field of History of Art. The system is Web-based and collaborative, and makes use of existing standards for information documentation and publication (CIDOC-CRM, RDF), focusing on semantic interoperability and the production of data of high value and long-term validity.