Data for History is an international consortium founded on 24 November 2017 with the aim of improving geo-historical data interoperability in the semantic web. Its purpose is to establish a common method for modelling, curating and managing data in historical research. Such a method would provide foundational support to research projects adopting a framework of collaborative, cumulative and interoperable scientific data production and investigation. The consortium aims to build up an international community of historians and computer scientists to first develop and then maintain a common ontological model that would allow for domain specific, semantically robust data integration and interoperability. The consortium aims to build this model in the conceptual framework of the CIDOC-CRM, in order to integrate to a broader cross-disciplinary modelling and data community. It begins already with the foundational modelling experience and data developed within the symogih.org project.
To support this process, the consortium has undertaken the developement of an ontology management environment which is designed to facilitate the understanding of different data models and ontologies related to the domain of historical research and support an open ontology development process. This platform will support a controlled development process of the ontology where the modification of the model (addition/modification/subtraction of classes and properties) will be tracked and submitted to a validation process by the expert community. This open and traceable process aims to foster the coherence and interoperability of the ontology model development in the domain of historical research. It will also allow the management of specific data models for research projects and use them for data production.
