Drawing from the conceptual model developed for the Henry III Fine Rolls project, this paper will briefly summarise the reasons for which such a conceptual model or ontology may be needed in conjunction with a set of documentary texts marked up in TEI.

It will then exemplify some of the naming scenarios that occur in the texts in question, to show the different nature of some implicit statements and how this is captured by the markup (with the use of TEI P4 elements and attributes). These representative cases will be used to demonstrate how these statements – implicit in the markup – have been transposed into an explicit model in an ontology (expressed in RDF/OWL).

Although the focus of this paper won’t be on the peculiarities of the Fine Rolls project, the possibility of exchange and crossings of data with projects dealing with the same period (e.g. the use of namespaces and URIs) will be mentioned, so as to point to the continuity between the development of a conceptual model of this kind and the principles behind the TEI as standard to facilitate data interchange and interoperability.

Our attempt of modeling ‘the world of the text’ will be analysed from a critical perspective, so as to highlight pragmatic solutions, problems and limitations both in our specific model and in the language used. Therefore, some generalisable reflections on how to do better when attempting to combine TEI texts and ontologies will be drawn.

The paper will also describe further possibilities to exploit the information modeled in the ontology, and how to make the most of it on the display front (e.g. by creating different forms of data visualization that wouldn’t be possible with the TEI documents alone).

The updated chapter on Names, Dates, People, and Places in TEI P5 will also be mentioned as the intermediate common format used between the digital and the print edition of the Henry III Fine Rolls project.

References

• Ciula, Arianna, Spence, P. and Vieira, J. M. (forthcoming). Expressing Complex Associations in Medieval Historical Documents: The Henry III Fine Rolls Project. Literary and Lingistic Comptuing.
• Dryburgh, P. and Hartland, B. (eds.), Ciula, A. and Vieira, J. M. (tech. eds.) (2007). Calendar of the Fine Rolls of the Reign of Henry III [1216-1248]. I: 1216-1224. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer.
• Eide, Ø. (2008). The Exhibition Problem. A Real Life Example with a Suggested Solution. Literary and Linguistic Computing, 23: 27-37.
• TEI Consortium, (eds.) (2007). Names, Dates, People, and Places. TEI P5: Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange. Version 1.0.1. Last updated on 3rd February 2008. TEI Consortium. http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5- doc/html/ND.html (accessed April 2008).
• Vieira, J. M. and Ciula, A. (2007). Implementing an RDF/OWL Ontology on Henry the III Fine Rolls. [paper presented at OWLED 2007, Innsbruck, June 6-7]. http://www.webont.org/owled/2007/PapersPDF/submission_6.pdf (accessed April 2008).