A curated list of ontologies for Digital Humanities
What is an awesome list?
This list collects useful ontologies, vocabularies, terminologies, and taxonomies for modelling and publishing datasets from Humanities domains as Linked Data. If you wish to contribute, send a PR or get in touch with IISG Data & Augmentation or Albert Meroño or Melodee Beals.
- General
- Computational / Digital Literary Studies
- Cultural Heritage
- Fiction Studies
- Language
- Musicology
- Periodicals
Persons, places, events, time, documents
- CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) - provides definitions and a formal structure for describing the implicit and explicit concepts and relationships used in cultural heritage documentation
- CRMinf Argumentation Model - an Extension of CIDOC-CRM to support argumentation
- ELLST - The European Language Social Science Thesaurus (ELSST) is a broad-based, multilingual thesaurus for the social sciences. The thesaurus consists of over 3,000 concepts and covers the core social science disciplines: politics, sociology, economics, education, law, crime, demography, health, employment, information and communication technology and, increasingly, environmental science.
- FOAF vocabulary - linking people and information
- Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Record (FRBR) - for describing documents and their evolution
- Geonames - covers all countries and contains over eleven million placenames that are available for download free of charge
- GeoSPARQL - the richest and most common spatial ontologies, plus an optional SPARQL extension (hence the name) that supports spatial reasoning over geodata that are annotated with its ontology. Supported by various triples stores, such as TriplyDB (Druid) triple stores
- LIO - A Lightweight Ontology for Describing Images
- NIE-INE ontologies - infrastructure developed to ensure long-term storage of data of scientific edition projects in the Humanities at the Swiss Universities of Basel, Bern, Zürich, and Geneva
- Persons in Context - The Persons in Context Ontology is a knowledge model for describing person observations and (derived from them) uniquely identified persons using schema.org and other existing vocabularies
- PROV ontology - set of classes, properties, and restrictions that can be used to represent and interchange provenance information
- OWL Time - Time ontology in OWL
- Perio.do - a gazetteer of period definitions for linking and visualizing data
- Simple Event Model (SEM) - an ontology for modelling events
- Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) - standards to support the use of knowledge organization systems (KOS) such as thesauri, classification schemes, subject heading lists and taxonomies within the framework of the Semantic Web
- schema.org - schemas for structured data on the Internet, on web pages, in email messages, and beyond
- VIAF - combines multiple name authority files into a single OCLC-hosted name authority service
Literature, poetry, etc.
- GOLEM - For narrative and fiction, especially fan fiction
- INTRO - The Intertextual, Interpictorial, and Intermedial Relations Ontology - INTRO is an Intertextual Relationships Ontology for literary studies
- Literary Theme Ontology (LTO) - A taxonomy of defined literary themes for thematically annotating works of fiction
- MiMoText - For literary history
- Ontopoetry- For poetry
Cultural heritage objects, museums, archaeology, etc.
- CRMArcheo Excavation Model - an ontology and RDF Schema to encode metadata about the archaeological excavation process (CIDOC-CRM extensnion)
- Europeana Data Model (EDM) - proposal for structuring the data that Europeana will be ingesting, managing and publishing on museums, digital archives and digital libraries
- Getty AAT Art and Architecture Thesaurus - an evolving vocabulary, growing and changing on art and architecture
- IDS - The Intermediate Data Structure (IDS) is a standard data format that has been adopted by several large longitudinal databases on historical populations.
- ICONCLASS - a multilingual classification system for cultural content, the de facto global standard for subject classification
- JUSO - Juso Ontology is a Web vocabulary for describing geographical addresses and features
- Linked Art Data Model - The Linked Art Data Model is a (CIDOC-CRM) application profile that can be used to describe cultural heritage resources, with a focus on artworks and museum-oriented activities. It defines common patterns and terms to ensure that the resulting data can be easily used and is based on real-world data and use cases.
- NAO - The ontology of the Dutch National Archive https://archief.nl/def/ontologie/
- ODRL - The Open Digital Rights Language
- PNV - The Person Name Vocabulary (PNV) is an rdf vocabulary and data model for persons' names
- RiC-O - RiC-O (Records in Contexts-Ontology) is an OWL ontology for describing archival record resources
- ROAR - Ontology to describe person, location etc. observations in archival resources
Newspapers, magazines, etc.
Scores, music metadata, symbolic notations
- DOing REusable MUSical data (DOREMUS) datamodel - Events, works, expressions around classic music data
- MIDI ontology - for publishing MIDI pieces, tracks, events, and their attributes
- MusicOWL - ontology for encoding music scores of western music
- Music ontology (MO) - provides main concepts and properties for describing music (i.e. artists, albums and tracks) on the Semantic Web
- Music theory ontology (MTO)
Lexicology, named entity recognition, etc.
- Lemon - Lemon is a proposed model for modeling lexicon and machine-readable dictionaries and linked to the Semantic Web and the Linked Data cloud
- Lexvo - brings information about languages, words, characters, and other human language-related entities to the Linked Data Web and Semantic Web
Film, literature, etc.
- Drammar - a comprehensive ontology of drama
- Taxonomy of Themes and Motifs (TTM2) - a taxonomy of approximately 1,250 Latin labeled themes/motifs, categorized into six different areas: Animalia [Animals], Arbores et virentia [Trees and Plants], Homines [Men], Dei et heroes [Gods and Heroes], Loca [Places], and finally Res [Things]
