The SeaLiT Ontology – An Extension of CIDOC-CRM for the Modeling and Integration of Maritime History Information

We describe the construction and use of the SeaLiT Ontology, an extension of the ISO standard CIDOC-CRM for the modelling and integration of maritime history information. The ontology has been developed gradually, following a bottom-up approach that required the analysis of large amounts of real primary data (archival material) as well as knowledge and validation by domain experts (maritime historians). We present the specification of the ontology, RDFS and OWL implementations, as well as knowledge graphs that make use of this data model for integrating information originating from a large and diverse set of archival documents, such as crew lists, sailors registers, naval ship registers, and payrolls. We also describe an application that operates over these knowledge graphs and which supports historians in exploring and quantitatively analysing the integrated data through a user-friendly interface. Finally, we discuss aspects related to the use, evolution, and sustainability of the ontology.