Using geospatial semantic web for exploring geographic knowledge in medieval manuscripts

This paper explores the capabilities of the Geospatial Semantic Web to support scholars in studying the geographic knowledge included in medieval and Renaissance works. In the context of the Italian national research project IMAGO, we developed a CRM-based ontology that aligns with the Open Geospatial Consortium (OCG) GeoSPARQL standard. The ontology enables geospatial queries on the IMAGO knowledge graph. The results of these queries, as detailed in this paper, demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach in representing the geospatial data and in inferring new knowledge. For example, using this approach, we are able to identify all the works that mention places in a specific region, or by combining geographic knowledge with knowledge about the literary genre of the works, we can identify authors who travelled to a particular territory, such as the Holy Land. Furthermore, combining temporal and geospatial information enables us to discover places within a particular territory mentioned in manuscripts of a specific century. These examples demonstrate the potential of the Geospatial Semantic Web approach to uncover previously hidden connections and enrich our understanding of historical and geographical data.