Structured Descriptions of Roles, Activities, and Procedures in the Roman Constitution

Abstract

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.

Architectures for complex semantic models

“…The BFO (Basic Formal Ontology) because it is relatively well developed and because it is a "realist" ontology. We believe that basic histories are also largely "realist" and we have proposed applying BFO to full-text and rich media digital libraries [9,14]. As a result of this approach, BFO describes the world with universals rather than with concepts.…”

“…We have been exploring the application of BFO for the description of complex dynamic environments such as communities [14].…”

“…While some entities in communities (e.g., families) are nuanced social objects, many other entities such as those which appear in newspapers are relatively mundane (at least to the extent that they are typically described in the newspapers). In addition, [14] explored the application of BFO, Processes, and Procedures in a description of the Roman Constitution as it is described in Gibbon's "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire".…”

“…While systems may be static, we are most interested in systems which are dynamic -those which have processes and procedures which fulfill specific roles and functions (see [14]). Ultimately, as part of our understanding of complex entities, we need to incorporate insights from System Dynamics, General Systems Theory, and Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) into our models.…”

“…Some aspects of communities are relatively routine and well structured. We believe these can be well modeled by ontologies (e.g., [14]) and in some cases by agent-based models (e.g., [41]). Other aspects such as the relationships between people in families are idiosyncratic and hard to model.…”