Graphes de connaissances pour représenter et analyser l'évolution des territoires en Histoire

Abstract

The notion of territory amounts for an important part of human and social sciences. As a spatio-temporal object considered from the digital humanities viewpoint, the question of its digital representation brings forward the need to represent its various aspects. Territory is considered here as a geographical area defined by stakeholders exerting a defined kind of power (religious, legal, …) over said area, or at least trying to exert it. Inspired by the territorial ontologies TSN and TSN-Change, we propose the HHT ontology (Hierarchical Historical Territory) which is designed to represent the state of affairs of various hierarchical territorial divisions identified by historians’ research. Such territory representation implies an overcoming of the main difficulty of such work, which is the lack of exhaustive historical sources regarding the whole territory. Additionally, the HHT ontology endeavors to represent the former states of historical knowledge of territories, now considered deprecated. Defined as part of the ANR ObARDI project, which aims to study territories under the historical period known as Ancien Régime (1661-1789), HHT fills the specific need of representing hierarchical historical territorial divisions.

Victor Gay

Assistant Professor of Economics

Assistant professor at Toulouse School of Economics (TSE) and at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST), University of Toulouse 1 Capitole.