Person-Oriented Ontologies Analysis for Digital Humanities Collections from a Metadata Crosswalk Perspective

Mapping between different representations of similar data is a common challenge in digital humanities (DH). In practical DH collections, the ‘person’ is an essential and centric unit and other parts could link to the ‘person’ to form the knowledge base. However, there is still no general and useful person-oriented ontology in DH community. Many practical DH projects have developed their own ontologies by DH experts, but these ontologies are not interoperable. Therefore, it is important to explore existing biographical ontologies and develop a comprehensive person-oriented ontology for DH. Using the metadata crosswalk method, we examined the ontologies provided for persons in three DH collections to analyze how they map onto standard ontologies such as FOAF (friend of a friend). This paper uncovers a significant and consistent gap between standard biographical ontologies and those used in practical DH collections, arriving at a set of heterogeneous problems, including different granularities of metadata. Consequently, we propose three key person-oriented ontological types of elements, drawing on this metadata crosswalk: basic biographical elements, relational elements, and explanatory elements (such as career, connected with role and time). This metadata crosswalk provides a foundation for future matching between person-oriented ontologies and facilitates semantic interoperability between DH collections.