Development of an ontology for modelling medieval manuscripts: the case of Progetto IRNERIO

The catalogue of digitized medieval texts managed by Progetto IRNERIO contains a rich amount of legal, cultural and historical data that is neither easy to access nor linked to relevant external information. This paper introduces an ontology, called Medieval Manuscripts Ontology (MeMO), to model these texts so as to allow researchers to represent, identify, analyse and retrieve the information within and related to them. MeMO has been designed with a solid methodology in order to be compliant with the requirements of the domain experts (the preservation of the historical narrative, the representation of the context and the description of the collection). Also, it is flexible and richly documented so as to be easily reusable and extensible for further expansions. Thus MeMO allows one to model the resources managed by Progetto IRNERIO with precise semantics so as to avoid information loss and to support a better representation of the conceptual complexities that characterize the collection.