Towards a genealogical ontology for the Semantic Web

Genealogy is an interesting domain for demonstrating the possibilities of the Semantic Web. As a first step towards such a demonstrator this paper introduces an ontology for the genealogical domain. First the existing standards are investigated and a short introduction into the Semantic Web is presented. After that two ontologies are introduced. The first ontology models the capturing of personal information from an (archival) resource. The second ontology models the personal information itself and can be used to capture genealogical information. The most important aspects of the ontologies introduced are (1) the possibility to model the relationship with the source from which the information is obtained, (2) the possibility to model the relationship with the agent responsible for the information and (3) the ion from nomenclature and time-representation in various cultures.