JISC Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre (http://www.ahessc.ac.uk)

Data Challenges in the Humanities:

‘ Ontologies and Semantic Interoperability for Humanities Data’

Mark Greengrass, University of Sheffield

Oscar Corcho, University of Manchester

JISC Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre (http://www.ahessc.ac.uk)

We are only at the beginning

From President George W. Bush’s administration, the expected volume of e-mail alone is estimated to be more than 100 million messages …

Which President George W. Bush?

Which Iraq war?

Where are the WMDs?

JISC Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre (http://www.ahessc.ac.uk)

The data grand challenge • No large data set from automated

simulations• Intense human effort to better

understand heterogeneous resources such as artworks, texts, artefacts

• Semantics• Ongoing growth of corpora due to major

digitisation projects (OCR, OMR, etc.)• 180 terabyte Shoa foundation archives

will be no exception in the future

JISC Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre (http://www.ahessc.ac.uk)AHDS Collections

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1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005

Year

tota

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History

Archaeology

Literature/Linguistics

Visual Arts

Performing Arts

Collection Totals as of 20/11/06: 905 collectionsArch: 111 collectionsExec: 1 collectionHis: 619 collectionsLLL: 58 collectionsPA: 32 collectionsVA: 84 collections

AHDS Collections

JISC Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre (http://www.ahessc.ac.uk)

E-Science Theme Lectures

Three of them directly cover the challenges of Humanities Data

• 18/06: Semantics• 02/07: Grid-enabling Humanities

Data• 23/07: Space Time in Humanities

e-Science

JISC Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre (http://www.ahessc.ac.uk)

• You can watch this lecture online

• You can ask questions which I will read out at the end:

http://www.arts-humanities.net/event/76

Webcast and remote collaboration