ABSTRACT
Ontology development is an emerging method in the humanities for representing research in a format that is readable and queryable by both machines and humans. Recognizing the importance of ontologies to the Semantic Web, this chapter describes how to evaluate and link to existing web vocabularies and apply them to humanities research. Events like the could potentially be added to a future iteration of the ontology as new modes of digital scholarship emerge. Literature contains the subclass Poetry, which in turn contains the subclasses Poem and Poetry Collection. The class Poem contains additional subclasses of forms. Nested hierarchical structure of classes and properties in an ontology is complemented by a collection of logical axioms that articulate relationships among properties, classes, and the things within them. Class expressions use computational primitives combined with our ontology’s defined classes and properties to create complex definitions that refine the relationships between the parts of our ontology.
