Profiles
This page presents the concept of "profiles" in Geovistory and how to use them.
What is a profile?
A profile is a collection of classes and properties, related to a specific topic. You can activate profiles individually in Geovistory, according to their relevance to your project’s theme.
--> E.g. The profile “Education” includes – among others – the class “study”, that you can use to add information concerning a person’s learning activity.
It also includes the property “is obtained at”, which allows you to link the obtention of a study title to a geographical place.
Class: a class is a collection of individual or objects characterized by the same properties.
--> E.g. “Person” is a class. Every “person” shares the same properties (basic ones like “has a name”, “was born” etc.); more specific properties can be added by activate new profiles.
Property: a property is a connection between entities.
--> E.g. The property “has its origins in” allows you to link a entity of the class “Person” to a “Geographical place”.
Entity: an entity is a concrete example of a class; the specific data that you will add to your project will be entered in the form of “entities”. It is also often referred to as a concrete "instance" of a class.
--> E.g. “Geneva” is an entity of the class “Geographical place”.
The profiles you have activated will therefore determine which classes will be available when you add a new entity (and which properties can be assigned to them).
The profile "Geovistory Basics" is activated by default. It includes essential classes and properties, like source objects and basic entity classes such as person, geographical place, group or construction.
Where do profiles come from?
Profiles accessible in Geovistory Toolbox are curated and maintained in the openly accessible ontology management environment OntoME. This is why you can often find links to OntoME, where profiles and classes are described in more detail.
Learn here about OntoME.
Be aware that some labels of classes and properties differ in the Geovistory Toolbox compared to OntoME. This is because we changed some of them to make their usage more intuitive.
Choose the profiles you want to use
The profiles should be activated according to your needs. You could then ask yourself:
“What kind of data will my project focus on?” and “What characteristics of this data would I like to study or visualize?”
--> E.g. A historian studying the correspondence between eighteenth-century scholars, will likely focus on Persons (the scholars) and Letters (which can be added as a “Source”). Some research questions might be: Who is corresponding with whom? On what subject ? What are their displines? Who was part of a group such as an academy, during what period etc.?
Quite intuitively, one could directly activate the following profiles: “Biographical basics and family”, “Higher education” and “Intellectual and literary life”.
Note: Learn here how profiles relate to the overarching ontology applied in Geovistory and how the profiles are relevant for adding new classes to your project.
Add a profile
To see which profiles are activated in your project and activate new ones, go to “Settings” on the bottom left of the page, and click on “Ontology settings” > “OntoMe Profiles”.
Whenever you activate a new profile, you can see which new classes and properties will be added to your project (and which were already available).
Note: Profiles are sometimes adapted to take new developments into account, you can update them to be sure to work with the most recent version. This will not affect your library, but will give you new possibilites.
The different steps of activating new profiles are described in the following screenshots; you can also watch the video below:
Activating profiles step by step
Go to “Settings” on the bottom left of the page, and click on “Ontology settings” > “OntoMe Profiles”.
Clicking on "activate other profiles", a window containing the list of available profiles appears. By clicking on the arrow on the left of the profile title, a description will allow you to learn more about its use.
Before validating the activation, a new window will appear, listing the different classes and properties that will be added to your project (click on the arrow to get the details). It is possible to access the dedicated page in OntoME by clicking on the green identification number.
After validating the activation:
New entity classes appear when you hit the "add entity" button on your left in the entities module.
New fields appear in the "specific fields" section of your entity cards. All you have to do now is enter the specific informations!
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