ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the issue of developing an ontology of geographical places, intended as a shared, formal, high-level conceptualisation that provides the essential classes and properties to describe their social, spatial, and temporal evolution, in all its complexity and historical development. It first proposes a foundational and epistemological analysis of the notion of “place” in CIDOC CRM (ISO 21127:2014), a core ontology designed for the purpose of data integration in the field of cultural heritage. It then presents the essential aspects of the Semantic Data for Humanities and Social Sciences (SDHSS) ontology ecosystem, which extends CIDOC CRM and provides a generic and robust conceptualisation that allows different scientific disciplines to model geographical places in a common, transdisciplinary domain of discourse. This high-level conceptualisation enables the infinitely rich and complex aspects of human activity associated with places to be captured and modelled according to the specific research agendas of different disciplines, thus laying the groundwork for collaboratively building an extensible and improvable ontology through interdisciplinary dialogue and refinement, thereby enhancing and promoting interoperability and reuse of research data in the humanities and social sciences.
