Department of Anthropology Associate Professor Dr. Ethan Watrall recently co-authored an article in Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web with several colleagues, including first author Cogan Shimizu (Kansas State University), corresponding author Dr. Pascal Hitzler (Kansas State University), and fellow members of MATRIX: The Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences. The article is titled “The enslaved ontology: Peoples of the historic slave trade” and presents the Enslaved Ontology (V1.0). The Enslaved Ontology is a modeling approach for the Enslaved: People of the Historical Slave Trade project, for which Dr. Watrall is a Co-Principal Investigator, and brings together data to model the lives and movements of peoples in the historical slave trade.
Read the full article at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.websem.2020.100567
Abstract: “We present the Enslaved Ontology (V1.0) which was developed for integrating data about the historic slave trade from diverse sources in a use case driven by historians. Ontology development followed modular ontology design principles as derived from ontology design pattern application best practices and the eXtreme Design Methodology. Ontology content focuses on data about historic persons and the event records from which this data can be taken. It also incorporates provenance modeling and some temporal and spatial aspects. The ontology is available as serialized in the Web Ontology Language OWL, and carries modularization annotations using the Ontology Pattern Language (OPLa). It is available under the Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license.”