A knowledge base of medieval and renaissance geographic Latin works

The geography of the world created during the Middle Ages and Renaissance (VI-XV centuries) was crucial to the development of Western thought in the European history. Until now, to the best of our knowledge, Medieval and Renaissance geographic Latin literature has not been studied using digital methods. The Italian National research project IMAGO - Index Medii Aevi Geographiae Operum - (2020-2023) aims at providing a systematic overview of this literature using Semantic Web technologies and the Linked Open Data paradigm. As the first step to develop tools to support scholars in creating, evolving and consulting a knowledge base (KB) of the geographic works, we created an OWL 2 DL ontology. To maximize its interoperability, we developed the ontology as an extension of two reference vocabularies: the CIDOC CRM and FRBRoo (including its in-progress reformulation LRMoo). In this paper, we briefly present the project, the ontology, and the automatic and semi-automatic tools we developed to populate it. The final aim of the project is the creation of a Web application allowing scholars to freely access and visualise the data collected in the IMAGO knowledge base.