Golden Agents

Ontologies

The Golden Agents project develops ontologies to support research of interactions between the various branches of the creative industries of the Dutch Golden Age  and between producers and consumers of cultural goods in the context of the research infrastructure that combines semantic web and multi-agent technologies. As a founding member oThe Golden Agents project develops ontologies to support research of interactions between the various branches of the creative industries of the Dutch Golden Age and between producers and consumers of cultural goods in the context of the research infrastructure that combines semantic web and multi-agent technologies. As a founding member of the Data4History consortium the project plays a prominent role in the development of ontologies for historical disciplines that are completely compliant with current standards in cultural heritage institutions, such as the CIDOC-CRM and FRBR. In particular, the “evidence-based storylines ontologies” model (see for more info here and here) that the Golden Agents develops will allow for linking heterogenous datasets relevant for historical and literary research in the humanities in a meaningful way and will support computer agents to provide users feedback to their queries.

Part of this infrastructure are two core ontologies:

  1. A generic Golden Agents ontology that facilitates research into these creative industries to which all datasets from external content providers (e.g. Rijksmuseum, RKD, ECARTICO) are mapped or converted. This allows a user to ask questions in a single vocabulary and allows computer agent technology to assist a user in her/his queries.
  2. A purpose-built ontology (working title ROAR++) that is specific for archival or primary sources. This ontology is used to model datasets that we convert to RDF ourselves and that have a connection with a primary source, such as a scan or textual fragment. This is also the ontology that is used to model the process of extracting (named) entities from the Amsterdam City Archive’s HTR documents, of which the probate inventory collection is key to the Golden Agents project. This is work in progress. More information can be found here.

Team

Arianna Betti
Leader WP2 – Ontologies

Leon van Wissen
Scientific Programmer

Veruska Carretta Zamborlini
Ontologies Specialist – Modeler (former project member)