Description and Temporal Positioning of Historical Events and Periods by Using Links Between Temporal Resources

Abstract

The temporal beginning and end boundaries of a historical event and period are often represented as another event or period rather than an accurate date and time (e.g., the early modern period is often defined as beginning from the Renaissance). This study proposed a procedure to describe time intervals of events and periods whose boundaries are defined by other events or periods, as resource description framework (RDF) data and to determine their temporal positions. This procedure enables an RDF data to have information about the original definition and semantics of the historical event or period in addition to temporal range. Calendar periods, such as dates, months, years and decades also can be considered as resources having a temporal range just like the historical events and periods, and can be used to specify boundaries of a time range. This means that the time intervals described according to the proposed procedure can be processed in the same framework, regardless of whether they are based on dates or events. Subsequently, this study examined the temporal position of a time interval by tracing links between resources used to specify the time interval.