Title: Collections revisited from the perspective of historical testimonies

Authors: Annamaria Goy; Diego Magro

Addresses: Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Torino, C. Svizzera 185, Torino, Italy ' Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Torino, C. Svizzera 185, Torino, Italy

Abstract: This paper presents the results of an ontological analysis of collective entities, as an essential step towards the definition of a rich semantic model underlying ontology-driven applications in the historical and cultural heritage domains. The major contributions of our proposal are the following: (a) An explicit distinction of contingent and necessary features, that led us to formalise our ontology by means of modal logics. (b) A description of collective entities from a diachronic perspective (thus including singletons and empty collections). (c) An analysis of the inferences enabled by the characterisation of collective entities and by the inclusion relationships. (d) A representation of the inclusion relationships that does not imply existential dependence. (e) A distinction between emerging and created collective entities. In this paper, we present an in-depth ontological analysis of these aspects and provide a sound formalisation for it.

Keywords: collections; collective entities; ontology; ontological analysis; ontology-driven applications; semantic metadata; inference; modal logics; historical archives; cultural heritage.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMSO.2019.102677

International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies, 2019 Vol.13 No.4, pp.300 - 316

Received: 08 Jan 2019
Accepted: 31 Mar 2019
Published online: 01 Oct 2019 *

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