Interacting with an Ontology to Explore Historical Domains

The use of ontologies enables semantically driven access to a variety of digital resources. In this paper, we illustrate how an ontology can be exploited to provide structured access to Web-based resources. We present a case study in history of science that illustrates how to conceptualise and reason about a historical domain by taking a systematic approach to modelling time and events, based on existing artificial intelligence theories. An initial Web-based application has been implemented for exemplifying how an ontology can assist users to examine a historical conceptual space and to explore temporal relationships between scientific events.