Abstract
Enriching ontologies can measurably enhance research in digital curation. We support this claim by using an enriched ontology to address a well known, challenging problem: record linkage of historical records for intergenerational family reconstitution. An enriched ontology enables extraction of birth, death, and marriage records via linguistic grounding, curation of record-comprising information with pragmatic constraints and cultural normatives, and record linkage by evidential reasoning. The result is an automatic and highly accurate reconstruction of family trees. Empirical evidence shows that conceptual modeling theory can be applied to important real-world problems and yield excellent results.
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Notes
- 1.
In [8], 880 personas of 9,279 were determined to have matches. From this training set, weights were estimated (e.g. \(4.6_{0908}\) for Birth Year, \(4.8_{9474}\) for Father’s Surname, \(0.0_{0176}\) for Birth Town). Lawson et al. argue that these weights should be universal, depending only on the chosen set of attributes. The technique for computing the weights is described by White [14].
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Acknowledgements
We thank Emeritus Professor George Nagy, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, for the development of GreenQQ and gratefully acknowledge the work of Gary James (Jim) Norris, who created a complete extraction ground truth for Flögeln and developed GreenQQ templates to attain near 100% extraction accuracy.
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Embley, D.W., Liddle, S.W., Lonsdale, D.W., Woodfield, S.N. (2021). Inter-Generational Family Reconstitution with Enriched Ontologies. In: Reinhartz-Berger, I., Sadiq, S. (eds) Advances in Conceptual Modeling. ER 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13012. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88358-4_6
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