A highly structured description of entities and events in histories can support flexible exploration of those histories by users and, ultimately, support richly-linked full-text digital libraries. Here, we apply the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) to structure a passage about the Roman Constitution from Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Specifically, we consider the specification of Roles such as Consul, Activities associated with those Roles, and Procedures for accomplishing those Activities.

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A new generation of digital libraries is now possible based on the large amount of open-access full-text and other rich-media materials available. Such content can be more richly modeled and cross-linked than is possible for traditional document-level digital libraries. For collections which include details of events such as collections of newspapers, structured descriptions could be developed to focus on events. For higher-level historical analysis a combination of content and discourse descriptions is needed. Prior work on composite hypertexts has focused almost exclusively on the relationship of the discourse terms without considering the semantics of the content. Here, we describe a framework and interface widgets that support interaction with a historical text which incorporates both discourse and content descriptions. Further, we consider broader issues of interaction based on rich description of content.

We have been exploring applications for complex semantic models such as rich media science and history digital libraries. In this paper, we consider in more detail a range of services which could be implemented as well as technical details for those implementations.Many semantic tools are now available but these have rarely, if ever, been applied across broad and dynamic sets of complex instances. Modeling detailed histories involves complex entities interacting in complex ways.We consider architectures such as the Basic Formal Ontology and objectoriented models and we apply them in hybrid implementations using Jena/Java and Slate.

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