GO! geographical ontology

GO! (Geographical Ontology) ontology has been developed by Claudia Corcione, Paola De Caro and Silvia naro, with the collaboration of Diego Magro, Timothy Tambassi and Maurizio Lana for the research project “Geolat – geography for Latin literature”. It describes the geographical locations, with a particular attention to the description of the Ancient World, especially to give the opportunity of having a link between the places mentioned in the texts, especially ancient, and their identification and correspondence with contemporary ones. For classical scholars this correspondence of ancient / contemporary modelling is of undisputed interest, both for the study of the habits of the most ancient peoples, and for the most various themes of literary interest. Through ontologies you can build maps of the ancient world and compare them to contemporary ones, annotate historical, geographical, cultural details connected to the place, indicate in which ancient text the place is mentioned and as which author discloses the details. These are just some ideas for research that can be developed, but the scenario that opens through these connections will be much larger. The GO! modules contain numerous classes and relations and differ in the specific entities defined in them, and are connected by a Top Level ontology - GO TOP ( http://purl.org/geolit/GO-TOP ): • an ontology that describes the physical and natural places ( http://purl.org/geolit/GO-PHY ) • an anthropic ontology, in which are specified all administrative bodies and artifacts created by human activity ( http://purl.org/geolit/GO-HUM )an • an ontology for the ancient world, which describes the specific aspects ( http://purl.org/geolit/GO-FAR ), where FAR means For Ancient Resources. The GO! ontology serves as an information base for the platform of the project GeoLat. The GO! modelling choices took into account the needs which the ontology must meet, allowing to add a range of additional information about the geographical place, through the inclusion of ad hoc relationships, in particular it is possible to express: • the correspondence with the places listed by Pleiades (historical online gazetteer http://pleiades.stoa.org/) • the physical and cultural characteristics shown in the Barrington Atlas • the source where the ancient place is mentioned (with philological reference) • the geographical coordinates of corresponding contemporary sites • a description of historical events (wars, defeats ...) • the changes of the place (e.g. a village which becomes a city) • the hypotesized location of imaginary places (such as Hades) • the physical and geopolitical description of the place These are only some of the potentialities of the GO! ontology, which incorporates some standard ontologies (for example GeoSPARQL), so as to be more easily shared and reused, because the quality of the ontology and the project in its entirety resides in its widespread use, in order to become a benchmark for the projects that link to the geographical description.