Henry III Fine Rolls RDF-XML OWL ontology

Between 1216 and 1248 the Fine Rolls translations have been encoded so as to record occurrences of people and places names as well as references to a set of subjects predefined by the research project team.

A separate ontology was created to represent the entities (mainly people, places or subjects) that are mentioned in the rolls and to model scholarly judgements about their interconnections. The ontology was based on what at the time of the project initiation were emerging technologies associated with the semantic web 2 (RDF/OWL) and with knowledge representation in the cultural heritage sector (CIDOC CRM).

This ‘ontological’ approach is used to model information about entities referenced as part of the scholarly research, and to incorporate other key standards used for modelling humanities materials, including standards for geospatial, conceptual or time-related data. Detailed information about each entity (e.g. original name of a person versus modernised spellings, patronymic versus tomonymic surname, textual variants) is included in the ontology as well as the expression of complex relationships with other entities. This system is the backbone of the rich indexes and search available on the project website but exposed for the first time as part of this Dataset.

For information on how the translations of the rolls were encoded following the TEI schema see http://www.finerollshenry3.org.uk/content/commentary/technical.html