The EUROPANGE project, involving both medievalists and computer scientists, aims to study the emergence of a corps of administrators in the Angevin controlled territories in the XIII–XV centuries. Our project attempts to analyze the officers' careers, shared relation networks and strategies based on the study of individual biographies. In this paper, we describe methods and tools designed to analyze these prosopographical data. These include OLAP analyzes and network analyzes associated with cartographic and chronological visualization tools.
This work applies knowledge engineering’s techniques to medieval illuminations. Inside it, an illumination is considered as a knowledge graph which was used by some elites in the Middle Ages to represent themselves as a social group and exhibit the events in their lives, and their cultural values. That graph is based on combinations of symbolic elements linked each to others with semantic relations. Those combinations were used to encode visual metaphors and influential messages whose interpretations are sometimes tricky for not experts. Our work aims to describe the meaning of those elements through logical modelling using ontologies. To achieve that, we construct logical reasoning rules and simulate them using artificial intelligence mechanisms. The goal is to facilitate the interpretation of illuminations and provide, in a future evolution of current social media, logical formalisation of new encoding and information transmission services.
Prosopographic databases, which allow the study of social groups through their bibliography, are used today by a significant number of historians. Computerization has allowed intensive and large-scale exploitation of these databases. The modeling of these proposopographic databases has given rise to several data models. An important problem is to ensure a level of quality of the stored information. In this article , we propose a generic data model allowing to describe most of the existing prosopographic databases and to enrich them by integrating several quality concepts such as uncertainty, reliability, accuracy or completeness.
