Prof. Günther Görz | Linked Biondo - Modelling Geographical Features in Renaissance Text and Maps

Guenther Goerz

FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, Computer Science Department, AG Digital Humanities, and Bibliotheca Hertziana (MPI), Rome (with contributions by Chiara Seidl and Martin Thiering)

The goal of Bibliotheca Hertziana's project "Historical spaces in texts and maps" is to investigate the relations between historic geographical texts and maps to reconstruct a historical understanding of space and the knowledge associated with it. Starting with a cognitive-semantic analysis of Flavio Biondo's "Italia Illustrata" (1474), toponyms, place descriptions and spatial relations are annotated in the text and in Renaissance maps. In general, our research combines cognitive-semantic parameters such as toponyms, landmarks, spatial frames of reference, geometric relations, gestalt principles, and different perspectives with computational linguistic analysis. We designed a workflow comprising the steps of transcription, annotation, geographic verification, export and ontology-based semantic enrichment of these data, finally stored and published as Linked Open Data. Our contribution to Spatial Humanities is based on the conviction that all maps are cognitive maps, depicting culture-specific spatial knowledge and practices.

Biondo’s mention of using non-identifiable maps gives a reason for comparing toponyms in his text and in 15th-century maps. We use various tools to annotate and to georeference places in texts and maps. Spatial relations in texts are annotated as encoding cognitive parameters, primarily in "figure-spatial_relation-ground" constructions, and mapped into subject-predicate-object triples. To achieve a generic semantic level for linguistic and map-related annotations, we perform a transition to a semantic representation based on the ontology CIDOC CRM (Conceptual Reference Model) and extensions. Using the CRM opens up a wide spectrum of interoperability and linking to many web resources. As Linked Data platform we chose the Virtual Research Environment WissKI, a semantic database extension of the CMS Drupal, in which we defined our data model in terms of so-called ontology paths. These are sequences of triples built from entities and properties of the ontology. From these paths, WissKI generates automatically input forms for map and text metadata and provides an interface for importing all table-formatted annotations and converting them into Linked Data triples. These data constitute a huge knowledge graph; they are the "raw material" for further research to explore the historical understanding of spaces and the associated knowledge.

In addition to the described analytic perspective, we also pursue a synthetic view in the sense that we will use the data found by the analytic steps to reconstruct plausible cognitive sketch maps in future work.