HistoricO: An Ontology for Modeling Social Classes, Power Positions, Institutions, Events and Rituals in Historical Narratives

The clear and precise modeling of complex concepts present in historical narratives, such as concepts relating to social classes, places and institutions, is of great importance for the analysis and deep understanding of historical texts. In this work we present HistoricO, a domain ontology designed to semantically represent such entities and their relationships in a coherent and structured way, providing a standardized, uninterrupted and shared vocabulary. This ontology, realized through the collaboration of knowledge engineers and historical domain experts, facilitates the automated analysis of historical texts, enables extraction and classification of key concepts and relevant information. The representation of social classes and historical institutions allows to visually and in a structured way capture all the complexity of the social and institutional context of a given historical period, offering a useful tool both for academic studies and for innovative applications in the field of artificial intelligence to support the management and organization of digital cultural contents, such as the analysis and automatic generation of historical contents. The work proposed in this article is a way to improve the accuracy of historical research and at the same time opens the way for interdisciplinary research activities involving the world of computer science with the humanities.