Knowledge Discovery from ISAD, Digital Archive Data, into ArchOnto, a

CIDOC-CRM based Linked Model

Dora Melo

1 a

, Irene Pimenta Rodrigues

2 b

and In

es Koch

3 c

Coimbra Business School - ISCAC, Polytechnic Institute of Coimbra, Portugal

Department of Informatics, University of

Evora, Portugal

INESC-TEC, Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto, Porto, Portugal

Keywords:

Natural Language Processing, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Archives Ontology, Semantic

Migration, ISAD(G), CIDOC-CRM, Linked Data.

Abstract:

This paper presents an automatic semantic migration prototype based on Knowledge Discovery from Digital

Archive Data for ontology population in the domain of Archives metadata, ISAD(G). Natural Language Pro-

cessing (NLP) techniques are used for language processing and Semantic Web techniques for querying and

updating the Ontology ArchOnto, a CIDOC-CRM (Conceptual Reference Model) extension. This work is

done in the context of project EPISA (Entity and Property Inference for Semantic Archives) where the Por-

tuguese National Archives, Torre do Tombo (ANTT) is one of the partners. The data model and description

vocabularies we adopted are built upon the CIDOC-CRM standard, an ontology, developed for museums by

the International Committee for Documentation (CIDOC) of the International Council of Museums (ICOM).

A detailed example of a baptism document metadata migration is presented to highlight the challenges on the

natural language interpretation and the ontology representation.

1 INTRODUCTION

This work is done in the context of the EPISA

project (Entity and Property Inference for Seman-

tic Archives), a research project involving the Por-

tuguese National Archives, Torre do Tombo (ANTT),

the archival experts from ANTT, and Information and

Computer Science researchers. EPISA intends to

design a prototype, an open-source knowledge plat-

form, to represent archival information on a linked

data model. One of the project major tasks is the

semantic migration, i.e, the process to extract and

represent the relevant entities and their properties

from the existing records in the actual DigitArq (Ra-

malho and Ferreira, 2004), the archive national sys-

tem that uses well-established description standards,

namely the ISAD(G) (General International Standard

Archival Description) (Sciﬂeet, 2001; International

Council on Archives, 2000) and ISAAR(CPF) (Vitali,

2004) with a hierarchical structure adapted to the na-

ture of archival assets.

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3744-2980

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2370-3019

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9363-9713

The data model and description vocabularies we

adopted are built upon the CIDOC-CRM (Concep-

tual Reference Model) standard, an ontology, devel-

oped for museums by the International Committee for

Documentation (CIDOC) of the International Coun-

cil of Museums (ICOM) (Meghini and Doerr, 2018;

ICOM/CIDOC-CRM Special Interest Group, 2019).

The ArchOnto ontology

(Koch et al., 2019; Koch

et al., 2020) extends the CIDOC-CRM ontology to

represent archives.

Our goal is to build a prototype for the auto-

matic migration of the information in existing Digit-

Arq records to the ArchOnto representation.

In some of DigitArq records that represent objects

metadata and ArchOnto properties and relations, it

is possible to identify homogeneity of the informa-

tion among them, such as the reference code, title,

dates, dimension and support, language, and physi-

cal location (de Almeida and Runa, 2018; Koch et al.,

2020). The semantic mapping of ISAD(G), Archival

Metadata, to the CIDOC-CRM Ontology can be strait

forward in some cases (Bountouri and Gergatsoulis,

ArchOnto OWL available at https://github.com/

feup-infolab/archontology/tree/master/ArchOnto 2020.

Melo, D., Rodrigues, I. and Koch, I.

Knowledge Discovery from ISAD, Digital Archive Data, into ArchOnto, a CIDOC-CRM based Linked Model.

DOI: 10.5220/0010134101970204

In Proceedings of the 12th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (IC3K 2020) - Volume 2: KEOD, pages 197-204

ISBN: 978-989-758-474-9

197

2011; Oldman, 2014). However, in some records the

information in DigitArq is a text ﬁeld that must be

interpreted in order to extract the entities, events, lo-

cals, dates, relations and proprieties to populate the

ArchOnto ontology. In those text ﬁelds, our approach

uses natural language processing tools for Portuguese

language to mark terms that are interpreted to insert

new instances of concepts and relations into the exis-

ting ontology.

The use of natural language processing tools to

automatically populate an ontology with the informa-

tion extracted from text is a current investigation topic

with many proposals (di Buono et al., 2014; Makki

et al., 2008; Makki, 2017; Maynard et al., 2008).

This paper describes our approach to automati-

cally populate the ArchOnto with the ISAD(G) format

of archives metadata.

In section 2, our approach to the automatic mi-

gration process from DigitArq records to ArchOnto

concepts, relations, and proprieties is presented. Sec-

tion 3 describes in detail our approach to represent the

extracted information from DigitArq text ﬁelds in the

ArchOnto concepts and proprieties, the examples re-

fer mostly to the representation in CIDOC-CMR con-

cepts and proprieties. Finally, in section 4, we draw

conclusions, further work and a future evaluation.

2 AUTOMATIC DOCUMENT

METADATA MIGRATION

The automatic migration of DigitArq records into Ar-

chOnto is based on simple translation rules for the

ﬁelds where there is a mapping between ISAD(G) and

CIDOC-CMR or its extension in ArchOnto, this case

will be detailed in the next section.

When there is no mapping between concepts, we

need to recognize what is written in text ﬁelds to ob-

tain concepts and its proprieties to populate the Arch-

Ont.

Figure 1 shows the architecture of our approach

to populate the ontology with the information of the

DigitArq HTML records including the information

extracted from the text ﬁelds.

In the following subsections the main steps of our

approach are explained.

2.1 Text Analysis

DigitArq database contains a huge and diverse

amount of records, currently over a million. Although

the database is structured, using a well-established

standard description, namely the ISAD(G) and

ISAAR(CPF) with a hierarchical structure adapted to

Figure 1: Automatic Migration Architecture.

the nature of archival assets, it is a hard task to analyse

and establish the information in text ﬁelds that needs

to be extracted and decide how to represented it in the

ontology.

Along with the development of the DigitArq

database, a web-based search engine was developed

to allow local and remote users to ﬁnd and browse the

Archive’s collections. The result is a well-structured

and normalised web page for each record showing the

whole information needed to be considered in the mi-

gration process.

Each record’s web page has a standardized

scheme following the ISAD(G) deﬁnitions, with the

information organized according to a set of known

ﬁelds and their values. Among this set of ﬁelds, there

are some that present atomic values, such as ”Refe-

rence code”, ”Title”, or ”Recipient”, and others, that

do not need further interpretation and the migration

process is directly performed by applying a prede-

ﬁned set of rules. Even for ﬁelds whose values are

not atomic, the migration process is done automati-

cally in the same way as the atomic values. However,

from non-atomic values, additional information can

be extracted after an adequate analysis and interpreta-

tion. For this purpose, it is applied the Morphological

and Syntactic Analysis to the non-atomic values. The

non-atomic values have a normalized structure, faci-

litating the analysis and interpretation process.

For instance, consider a baptism record and the

non-atomic ﬁeld ”Scope and content”. The informa-

tion of this ﬁeld is structured in a normalised way to

present the names of the parents, the grandparents,

and the godparents, as well as the birth date of the

person who is baptized, the recipient of the record.

The extraction of the web page content from spe-

ciﬁc ﬁelds is made by using the jsoup library

, a

Java HTML Parser that provides a very reliable, user-

friendly, and easy conﬁguration and parameter adjust-

http://jsoup.org

KEOD 2020 - 12th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Ontology Development

198

ments capabilities, for connecting to URLs and ex-

tracting and manipulating data.

The use of jsoup library to extract information

from web pages to be analyzed and interpreted is not

new and can be found in (Fragkou et al., 2016; Caval-

canti et al., 2017), the ﬁrst one presents a solution for

querying Greek governmental site, and the second one

presents a solution to extract semi-structured informa-

tion from web pages in the context of the innovation

environments of the state of S

ao Paulo, Brazil.

As an illustration, consider the baptism record

selected from the DigitArt database, which describes

the event baptism of the person called ”Ana”. Using

a set of jsoup functions, it is possible to extract in-

formation like the title, the ﬁelds and their values,

presented in the web page. For instance, the func-

tion title() allows to extract the title of the record, the

function getElementsByClass() allows to extract the

information per ﬁelds, and the function text() allows

to extract the values of each ﬁeld. jsoup also pro-

vides functions to connect and parse directly the web

page source, such as connect() followed by get(), and

parse(), respectively. The following fragment of Java

code illustrates how this is performed.

Document document = Jsoup.connect("http://pesquisa.adporto.arquivos.pt

/details?id=1374655").get();

print(document.title());

Elements fields = document.getElementsByClass("Field");

for(Element f: fields) print(f.text());

The function text() allows extracting from a ﬁeld

a String containing the ﬁeld’s name followed by its

value, which facilitates the task of applying rules to

analyse, interpret and migrate the information ex-

pressed by these ﬁelds. The Strings generated for the

”Ana”’s baptism record are

Description level Item

Reference code PT/ADPRT/PRQ/PPRT01/001/0004/00005

Title type Formal

Date range 1812-02-12 to 1812-02-12

Dimension and support 120x210mm ; papel

Recipient Ana

Scope and content Pais: Manuel de Oliveira e de Rufina Maria Avos

maternos: Manuel da Fonseca e Rosa da Silva Av

os paternos: Jos

de Oliveira e Jacinta de Oliveira Padrinhos: Manuel Martins

Ramos e Maria Francisca Data de nascimento: 10 de Fevereiro

de 1812

Physical location E/20/6/3 - 9.4 - fl. 3 v.,ass.5

Original numbering B1

Language of the material Por (portugu

es)

Creation date 5/22/2012 12:00:00 AM

Last modification 3/19/2013 10:55:46 AM

The information extracted is adequately analysed,

where each ﬁelds’ name and their values are identi-

ﬁed, the adequate ontology representation is estab-

lished, and the respective ontology individuals are

then generated. For this purpose, the non-atomic

values go through the Morphological and Syntactic

Analysis process to obtain a proper representation that

allows and facilitates the ontology representation of

https://pesquisa.adporto.arquivos.pt/details?id=

1374655

the additional information that can be extracted from

these ﬁelds. This process is explained in the next sec-

tion.

2.2 Morphological and Syntactic

Analysis

The Morphological and Syntactic Analysis step con-

sists of the text interpretation by means of lexical and

syntactic rules for the Portuguese language, which al-

lows identifying terms and concepts that can be re-

lated to the ontology concepts and properties.

The complete grammatical analysis is needed

when the information to be interpreted is not directly

related with the homogeneous representation of the

records structure. It is also needed to translate the

terms identiﬁed from Portuguese to the English lan-

guage, once the DigitArq records are expressed in

Portuguese and the ArchOnto ontology is represented

in the English language.

Consider again the baptism record mentioned be-

fore, which describes the event baptism of the per-

son called ”Ana”. Also, consider the sentence “Pais

Manuel de Oliveira e de Ruﬁna Maria” extracted from

the ﬁeld ”Scope and content”.

Using the Portuguese VISL parser

(Bick, 2014),

the result of the grammatical analyses of the sentence

pais [pai] <*> <Hfam> N M P @NPHR

Manuel de Oliveira [Manuel=de=Oliveira] <hum> <*> PROP M S @NPHR

e [e] KC @CO

de [de] PRP @ADVL

Rufina Maria [Rufina=Maria] <hum> <*> PROP F S @P<

By applying the parser, the sentence was divided

into three parts, the ﬁrst one ”Pais” (”Parents”) re-

ﬂects the relation assigned to the other two parts iden-

tiﬁed as names, the names of both parents. It also

gives, for instance, information about the multiplicity

or the gender of the terms, which are useful for fu-

ture interpretation of the corresponding concepts and

proprieties of the ontology.

2.3 Ontology and Knowledge Discovery

The Ontology and Knowledge Discovery step con-

sists in ﬁnding the concepts and properties repre-

sented in ArchOnto that are related to the terms found

at morphological and syntactic analysis level. To

broaden the search spectrum, it is also considered the

synonyms of the terms found. The ontology con-

cepts and properties found will be then ﬁltered based

Translation of ”Pais” is ”Parents”.

https://visl.sdu.dk/visl/pt/parsing/automatic/parse.php

Knowledge Discovery from ISAD, Digital Archive Data, into ArchOnto, a CIDOC-CRM based Linked Model

199

on the interpretation of the sentence and the exist-

ing relations between their terms or parts. This pro-

cess is made using Apache Jena

, an open source

Semantic Web framework for Java, that provides a

programming environment for RDF (Resource De-

scription Framework), RDFS (a general-purpose lan-

guage for representing simple RDF vocabularies on

the Web) and OWL (Web Ontology Language). In

particular, it provides a set of functionalities to ex-

tract data from and write to RDF graphs, intended

as an abstract model, which can be queried through

SPARQL (a semantic RDF query language).

Back to the sentence and the terms identiﬁed,

the ArchOnto ontology is questioned about the terms

”parent”, and its synonyms ”father”, and ”mother”.

For each term to be searched, a SPARQL query is

constructed and applied to the ontology. For instance,

related to the ”parent” the query is:

PREFIX rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#>

PREFIX owl: <http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#>

PREFIX rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#>

PREFIX xsd: <http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#>

SELECT ?subject

WHERE {

?subject rdfs:label ?label .

FILTER REGEX(?label,"parent", "i") .

}

The output are the CIDOC-CMR properties P152

is parent of, with domain E21 Person and range

E21 Person, and its inverse P152 has parent.

Based on morphological and syntactic analysis, as

well as the property found, it is inferred that the names

“Manuel de Oliveira” and “Ruﬁna Maria” are related

to the person who was baptized, and the relation ”is

parent of” makes them parents, more precisely father

and mother, see below for more details, of “Ana”, the

person whose the baptism record refers to.

The same search is made for the terms ”father”

and ”mother”, and the resulting properties are, res-

pectively, P97 from father (its inverse P97i was

father for) and P96 by mother.

Both properties have as domain the class E67

Birth and as range E21 Person. As such, the ex-

istence of a relationship between the three persons is

based on the existence of a birth event, the birth of

”Ana”. Therefore ”Manuel de Oiveira” (male and sin-

gular) and ”Ruﬁna Maria” (female and singular) are

respectively ”Ana”’s father and mother.

Regarding the birth event and the way to relate

it to the birth of a particular person, the CIDOC-

CRM provides the object property P98 brought

into life, with domain E67 Birth and range E21

Person.

Finally, all the identiﬁed names are related to the

concept of being a person and querying the ontology

https://jena.apache.org/index.html

for classes or properties that are related to the person’s

concept, the only result obtained was the class E21

Person.

2.4 Individuals’ Construction

The Construction of Individuals is the step of creating

the instances to populate the ontology and deﬁne the

relation between them.

After the identiﬁcation of all the concepts and

properties related to the text interpretation, it is pos-

sible to instantiate the individuals of each class and

assign the properties between them.

Regarding to the example, at least the following

statements are generated:

E21 Person("Ana")

E21 Person("Manuel de Oliveira")

E21 Person("Rufina Maria")

P152 is parent of(E21 Person("Manuel de Oliveira"),

E21 Person("Ana"))

P152 is parent of(E21 Person("Rufina Maria"), E21 Person("Ana"))

P98 brought into life(E67 Birth("Ana’s Birth"), E21 Person("Ana"))

P97 from father(E67 Birth("Ana’s Birth"),

E21 Person("Manuel de Oliveira"))

P97 by mother(E67 Birth("Ana’s Birth"),E21 Person("Rufina Maria"))

3 ARCHIVAL INFORMATION

DATA MINING THROUGH

ArchOnto

Even though DigitArq has a great diversity of records,

as mentioned before, it is possible to identify the ho-

mogeneity information among them, such as the ref-

erence code, title, dates, dimension and support, lan-

guage, and physical location.

Taking into account the ISAD(G) concepts, the

reference code and the physical location can be con-

sidered identiﬁers of the document, which are re-

presented in the ArchOnto by the class named E42

Identifier. The other concepts have the following

representation: dimension by E54 Dimension, sup-

port by E57 Material, titles by E35 Title, dates by

E52 Time-Span, and language by E56 Language.

The description of events characterise a huge vo-

lume of documents placed in the archive. These

events are mostly related to persons, places, and also

time periods, which are subjects that are central in

the archival description. ArchOnto, as an extension

of CIDOC-CRM ontology, has a quite rich and com-

plete representation regarding the concepts of event,

people, place, and time, which allows to match and

to automate the process of generating the individuals

and populate the ontology.

KEOD 2020 - 12th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Ontology Development

200

3.1 Person’s Information

Consider again the ”Ana”’s baptism record. As men-

tioned before, one of the information that is possible

to extract from the baptism record, more precisely

from the ﬁeld named ”Scope and content”, is both

names of Ana’s parents, which appears in the sentence

”Pais: Manuel de Oliveira e de Ruﬁna Maria”, as seen

before.

Consider the name of the father ”Manuel de

Oliveira”, which is a full name, and refers to a per-

son. ArchOnto makes available the class E21 Person

to represent the concept person. The class E21

Person is derived from the root E1 CRM Entity,

which means that every person is an entity of the on-

tology. Therefore, it is possible to infer that every

person has an appellation, using the property P1 is

identified by, with domain E1 CRM Entity and

range E41 Appellation, which is the representation

of a person’s name.

Regarding to the person’s name, it is also possi-

ble to distinguish different identiﬁcations such as ﬁrst

name, surname, full name, nickname, etc.. These

kind of identiﬁcation are considered types of names,

which are represented in the ontology by the class

ARE7 Name Type (a subclass of the class E55 Type),

and the property P2 has type, with domain E1 CRM

Entity (super class of E41 Appellation) and range

E55 Type, enables to represent the relation between

the appellation of a person and all its related types of

names.

Thereby, the person ”Manuel de Oliveira”, in

addition to its full name, has also a ﬁrst name

”Manuel” and a surname ”de Oliveira”. Figure 2

shows the graph representation of the person ”Manuel

de Oliveira”, using Prot

Figure 2: Person’s Instance ”Manuel de Oliveira”.

3.2 Temporal Information

The baptism record also provides information about

the event’s date, as well as the birth date of the per-

son who was baptized. Consider the birth date of

”Ana” set by the sentence ”Data de nascimento

: 10

de Fevereiro de 1812

”, information extracted from

the same ﬁeld as the parents’ names.

The ArchOnto model deﬁnes the temporal infor-

mation, which refers to some time that is certain, as

a time-span concept, with the class E52 Time-Span.

As well as the class E21 Person also the class E52

Time-Span is derived from the super class E1 CRM

Entity, which means that every time-span is an en-

tity of the ontology. Therefore, the same way as a

person, every time-span has an appellation, which can

be set by using the property P1 is identified by

mentioned before, where the appellation is the identi-

ﬁcation of the birth date.

The temporal information concept comprises a

time interval. In this particular example, it com-

prises just one day, with a date-time representation.

A time or temporal interval is deﬁned by the class

Interval (subclass of the class DataObject, which

represents generically literal information, such as in-

teger, string, date, etc.). The value of a temporal

information is stated by using the object property

hasValue, with domain E1 CRM Entity and range

DataObject. Each temporal interval value has a type,

which is certain, and is stated using the property P2

has type. Also each interval of time has a start

and an end date values, which are represented with

the data properties, respectively, startDateValue

and endDateValue, both with domain Interval and

range xsd:dateTime. The Figure 3 shows the deﬁni-

tion of the ontology individual with birth date ”10 de

fevereiro de 1812”.

Figure 3: Time-Span’s Instance ”Data de nascimento: 10 de

fevereiro de 1812”.

3.3 Well Known Events

The ArchOnto model describes and represents expli-

citly some known events, like birth or death, where

the class E67 Birth (subclass of the class E5 Event,

which is a E2 Temporal Entity) represents the con-

cept birth. This fact facilitates the representation of

The translation of ”Data de nascimento” is ”Birth

date”.

”10 de Fevereiro de 1812” refers to the date ”10 Febru-

ary 1812”.

Knowledge Discovery from ISAD, Digital Archive Data, into ArchOnto, a CIDOC-CRM based Linked Model

201

the known events with no further interpretation.

To establish that some birth event is related to the

birth of a speciﬁc person, the ArchOnto provides the

object property P98 brought into life, with do-

main E67 Birth and range E21 Person.

To deﬁne temporal relations between individuals,

the ArchOnto ontology makes available the P4 has

time-span property, with domain E2 Temporal

Entity and range E52 Time-Span, Since the class

E2 Temporal Entity is a super class of the class E5

Event, that in turn is a super class of E67 Birth, the

P4 has time-span property allows to assign a date

to a person’s birth.

Back to the sentence ”Pais: Manuel de Oliveira

e de Ruﬁna Maria” and as seen before in Subsection

2.3, to establish that the person ”Manuel de Oliveira”

is the father of ”Ana”, the ArchOnto provides the ob-

ject property P97 from father, with domain E67

Birth and range E21 Person, and to establish that

”Maria Ruﬁna” is the mother of ”Ana”, the ArchOnto

makes available the object property P96 by mother,

also with domain E67 Birth and range E21 Person.

As we have seen, the relations of being a father or

a mother of someone else is established through the

birth event, in this case through the birth of ”Ana”.

The Figure 4 shows the birth event of the person

”Ana”, the relations established with her parents and

the date of her birth.

Figure 4: Birth of ”Ana”.

This kind of document provides information about

someone’s person birth from its baptism record, but it

also provides information about the grandparents of

the baptized person, which allows establishing more

two birth events concerning to both parents of the per-

son who was baptized. In particular, the ”Ana”’s bap-

tism record provides the sentences ”Av

os maternos

Manuel da Fonseca e Rosa da Silva” and ”Av

os pater-

nos

: Jos

e de Oliveira e Jacinta de Oliveira”, the ﬁrst

one identiﬁes the grandparents from mother’s side and

The tranlation of ”Av

os maternos” is ”Maternal grand-

parents”.

The tranlation of ”Av

os paternos” is ”Paternal grand-

parents”.

the second one identiﬁes the grandparents from the

father’s side. However, with the information made

available, it is not possible to know when both births

occurred.

3.4 Sponsor’s Relations

Information like grandparents and godparents is pos-

sible to extract from baptism records, but this kind of

information is not directly represented by an ontology

concept. However, the use of a ternary relation makes

possible to deﬁne the nature of a person’s participant

on an event. The ternary relation is identiﬁed in the

ArchOnto by the object property P14 carried out

by, with domain E7 Activity and range E39 Actor,

applied to the P14.1 in the role of property.

Consider again ”Ana”’s baptism record and its

ﬁeld ”Scope and content”. The sentence ”Padri-

nhos

: Manuel Martins Ramos e Maria Francisca”

provides the name of both godparents. For instan-

ce, consider the godfather, a person with the name

”Manuel Martins Ramos”. The relation established

between the person ”Ana” and the baptism event is

that ”Ana” is the person who was baptized. In the

other case, the relation established between the per-

son ”Manuel Martins Ramos” and the baptism event

is that this person is set has godfather of who was bap-

tized. Since the baptism event is the same, it is possi-

ble to conclude and represent that the person ”Manuel

Martins Ramos” is the godfather of ”Ana”. Figure 5

shows the use of the ternary relation to deﬁne the role

of a person as a godfather and the action carried out

to turn that person into the godfather of someone else,

i.e., the deﬁnition of ”Manuel Martins Ramos” as the

godfather of ”Ana”.

Figure 5: The role godfather.

In the same way, the person ”Maria Francisca” is

deﬁned as the godmother of ”Ana”.

3.5 Events

Unlike birth, a baptism event has no concept represen-

tation available in ArchOnto. Therefore, the model

The translation of ”Padrinhos” is ”Godparents”.

KEOD 2020 - 12th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Ontology Development

202

provides the class E5 Event to deﬁne all the infor-

mation that are identiﬁed as events.

As already mentioned, a baptism record represents

itself a description of an event, with a set of homoge-

neous information, such as the happening date (time-

span instance), the identiﬁcation of the persons that

were present in the ceremony and are related to the

person who was baptized. These persons are identi-

ﬁed by their names and their relations to the baptized

person. Each name identiﬁcation generates a new per-

son instance, in case it does not yet exist in the ontol-

ogy population.

The relation between each instance and the bap-

tism event is deﬁned by using the proper object pro-

perty. As showed before, in subsection 3.3, the ob-

ject property P4 has time-span allows to assign a

date to an event. The baptism event is the bond to de-

ﬁne the godparents relations, as shown in the previous

subsection 3.4. Finally, to state the relation that some

event occurred in the presence of some person, the Ar-

chOnto provides the object property P12 occurred

in the presence of, with domain E5 Event and

range E77 Persistent Item, which is a super class

of the class E21 Person. The Figure 6 shows ”Ana”’s

baptism event.

Figure 6: The baptism event.

3.6 Document Information

As mentioned before, the DigitArq has a great diver-

sity of records, describing a huge amount of different

subjects in the archival ﬁeld. However, the informa-

tion is structured in an homogeneously way and, re-

gardless of the subject, the records contain informa-

tion about reference code, title, dates, dimension and

support, language, and physical location.

Identiﬁable immaterial items that make asser-

tions about reality are represented by the class E31

Document, subclass of E71 Human-Made Thing.

Therefore, a baptism record is classiﬁed as an instance

of E31 Document.

The title of a document is intended to be a for-

mal title and is represented in the ontology by the

class ARE2 Formal Title, subclass of E35 Title.

The property P102 has title, with domain E71

Human-Made Thing and range E35 Title, assigns a

formal title to a document.

Information like reference code is represented

by the class E42 Identifier, subclass of E41

Appellation, and the property P1 is identified

by, with domain E1 CRM Entity and range E41

Appellation, makes possible to assign a reference

code to its document.

Information that is possible to extract beyond the

structured is interpreted as information that is re-

ferred (directly or indirectly) by the record informa-

tion. The CIDOC-CRM makes available the property

P67 refers to, with domain E89 Propositional

Object (superclass of E31 Document) and range E1

CRM Entity, which allows to assign that information

was stated by a particular document.

Therefore, the ”Ana”’s baptism record is an ins-

tance of the class E31 Document, has a formal title,

a reference code, documents the baptism event, and

other structured information, but also refers to the per-

sons identiﬁed before, like ”Ana”, her parents, grand-

parents and godparents, as well as the births, events

dates, and so on. Figure 7 shows the representation of

”Ana”’s baptism record as an individual of the ontol-

ogy and some of its relations with other individuals.

Figure 7: Ana’s baptism record.

4 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE

WORK

We have presented an automatic semantic migration

prototype based on Knowledge Discovery from Dig-

ital Archive Data for ontology population in the do-

main of Archives metadata, ISAD(G). Our proto-

type uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) tech-

niques for language processing and Semantic Web

techniques for querying and updating the Ontology

ArchOnto. We describe the migration process detai-

ling the text ﬁelds morphological and syntactic analy-

Knowledge Discovery from ISAD, Digital Archive Data, into ArchOnto, a CIDOC-CRM based Linked Model

203

sis as inputs for the process of Ontology Knowledge

Discovery, showing how we query the ontology to

ﬁnding the concepts and properties represented in Ar-

chOnto that are related to the terms found at morpho-

logical and syntactic analysis level. The representa-

tion of different CIDOC-CMR concepts such as per-

sons, events, times, locations and documents is illus-

trated highlighting the migration process of baptism

document.

Future work includes the evaluation of the Ar-

chOnto population quality. Traditionally this evalua-

tion is done recurring to precision and recall measures

as in Information Retrieval. However, for ontology’s

population the binary classiﬁcation, yes/no, does not

take into account cases where the information is par-

tially captured, methods like Balanced Distance Met-

ric(Maynard et al., 2008) are more adequate to our

evaluation task. The EPISA project has the human re-

sources that will enable us to embrace this task. The

extension of the prototype to other documents types

will bring new challenges that still need good solu-

tions to be solved, for instance when a new person

shares some proprieties with a known person, shall

we consider that it is the same person? when a person

has the same names for its parents and grand parents

of a person known in ArchOnto, are they brothers?

should that relation be considered as a extension of

ArchOnto since it does not exists in CIDOC-CRM?

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work is ﬁnanced by National Funds through

the Portuguese funding agency, FCT (Fundac¸

para a Ci

encia e a Tecnologia) within project

DSAIPA/DS/0023/2018.

REFERENCES

Bick, E. (2014). Palavras, a constraint grammarbased pars-

ing system for portuguese. Working with portuguese

corpora, pages 279–302.

Bountouri, L. and Gergatsoulis, M. (2011). The semantic

mapping of archival metadata to the cidoc crm ontol-

ogy. Journal of Archival Organization, 9(3-4):174–

207.

Cavalcanti, M. C., Pereira, F. D., Fusco, E., and Mucheroni,

M. L. (2017). Model of data extraction in the innova-

tion environments of the state of s

ao paulo based on

semantic technologies. In International Conference

on Information Systems & Technology Management.

de Almeida, M. J. and Runa, L. (2018). ICON Project: Con-

tent integration in Portuguese National Archives using

CIDOC-CRM. In 2018 CIDOC Annual Conference.

di Buono, M. P., Monteleone, M., and Elia, A. (2014).

How to populate ontologies. In M

etais, E., Roche,

M., and Teisseire, M., editors, Natural Language Pro-

cessing and Information Systems, pages 55–58, Cham.

Springer International Publishing.

Fragkou, P., Kritikos, N., and Galiotou, E. (2016). Querying

greek governmental site using sparql. In Proceedings

of the 20th Pan-Hellenic Conference on Informatics,

PCI ’16, New York, NY, USA. Association for Com-

puting Machinery.

ICOM/CIDOC-CRM Special Interest Group (2019). Def-

inition of the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model.

ICOM, 6.2.7 edition.

International Council on Archives (2000). ISAD(G) Second

Edition. International Council on Archives.

Koch, I., Freitas, N., Ribeiro, C., Lopes, C. T., and da Silva,

J. R. (2019). Knowledge graph implementation of

archival descriptions through cidoc-crm. In Doucet,

A., Isaac, A., Golub, K., Aalberg, T., and Jatowt, A.,

editors, Digital Libraries for Open Knowledge, pages

99–106, Cham. Springer International Publishing.

Koch, I., Ribeiro, C., and Lopes, C. T. (2020). Archonto, a

cidoc-crm-based linked data model for the portuguese

archives. In 24nd International Conference on Theory

and Practice of Digital Libraries, TPDL.

Makki, J. (2017). Ontoprima: A prototype for automat-

ing ontology population. International Journal of

Web/Semantic Technology (IJWesT), 8.

Makki, J., Alquier, A.-M., and Prince, V. (2008). An

nlp-based ontology population for a risk management

generic structure. In Proceedings of the 5th Inter-

national Conference on Soft Computing as Transdis-

ciplinary Science and Technology, CSTST ’08, page

350–355, New York, NY, USA. Association for Com-

puting Machinery.

Maynard, D., Li, Y., and Peters, W. (2008). Nlp techniques

for term extraction and ontology population.

Meghini, C. and Doerr, M. (2018). A ﬁrst-order logic ex-

pression of the cidoc conceptual reference model. In-

ternational Journal of Metadata, Semantics and On-

tologies, 13(2):131–149.

Oldman, D. (2014). The CIDOC Conceptual Reference

Model (CIDOC-CRM): PRIMER. CRM Labs.

Ramalho, J. C. and Ferreira, J. C. (2004). Digitarq: cre-

ating and managing a digital archive. In Building

Digital Bridges: Linking Cultures, Commerce and

Science: 8th ICCC/IFIP International Conference on

Electronic Publishing held in Bras

ılia - ELPUB 2004,

Brasilia, Brazil, June 23-26, 2004. Proceedings.

Sciﬂeet, P. (2001). International standard archival descrip-

tion isad (g).

Vitali, S. (2004). Authority control of creators and the

second edition of isaar (cpf), international standard

archival authority record for corporate bodies, per-

sons, and families. Cataloging & classiﬁcation quar-

terly, 38(3-4):185–199.

KEOD 2020 - 12th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Ontology Development

204