Keywords

Record linkage, Enriched ontologies, Linguistic grounding, Pragmatic constraints, Cultural normatives, Evidential reasoning

Abstract

Enriching ontologies can measurably enhance research in digital humanities. Support for this claim is shown by using an enriched ontology to attack a well known and challenging problem: record linkage of historical records for inter-generational family reconstitution. An enriched ontology enables extraction of birth, death, and marriage records via linguistic grounding, curation of record-comprising information with pragmatic constraints and cultural normatives, and record linkage by evidential reasoning. The result is a fully automatic reconstruction of family trees. Using three historical record books containing a total of 29,229 extracted records, the enriched ontology links records with high accuracy: F-scores in the 90% range for all three books.

Original Publication Citation

David W. Embley, Stephen W. Liddle, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Scott N. Woodfield (2021). Inter-Generational Family Reconstitution with Enriched Ontologies. In: Iris Reinhartz-Berger andShazia Sadiq (Eds.), Advances in Conceptual Modeling: Proceedings of the 40th InternationalConference on Conceptual Modeling (ER 2021) Workshops CoMoNoS, EmpER, CMLS;Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science 13012, pp. 61-75. ISBN 978-3-030-88357-7.

Document Type

Conference Paper

Publication Date

2021

Publisher

International Conference on Conceptual Modeling

Language

English

College

Humanities

Department

Linguistics

University Standing at Time of Publication

Associate Professor

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