Knowledge Engineering for Historians/Modelling Historical Knowledge

Introduction | Knowledge Engineering — A Primer | Modelling Historical Knowledge | Advanced Topics

Modelling Historical Knowledge

Now that we are clear on the basics of knowledge modelling in general, we can turn to our task proper at hand and consider the tasks historians face in their research and how to deal with them appropriately.

We first would like to look at a main concern of historians, the proper handling of sources. Historians are nothing without their sources and they contain the knowledge we wish to represent and utilize. We then turn to the problem of how to deal appropriately with the work of their colleagues, another key element to historical research.

However, in order to discuss this topic we need to introduce some additional infrastructure, namely the notion of contexts. We will explain why we need these contexts, how they work, and what kind of problems their use poses.