Dictionnary

Here you will find a quick definition of some technical terms.

Class: A class is a collection of individuals or objects characterized by the same properties. There is, for example, a class for "Person", "Geographical Place", "Group", etc.

Entity: Entities are concrete applications or instances of classes. For example, Joe Biden is an entity of the class "Person". And "Amsterdam" is an entity of the class "Geographical Place". Learn more about entities here.

FAIR: The FAIR principles are designed to ensure the re-usability of research data. Learn here more about them and how Geovistory applies the FAIR principles.

Ontology: An ontology is a way of representing knowledge in a form that can be used for searching, aggregation and inference by humans and computers. An ontology seeks the classification and explanation of entities. (Hastings, 2017). CIDOC-CRM and DOLCE are examples of ontologies used in the humanities. Learn here more about the use of ontologies in Geovistory.

Persistent Item: A persistent item is an entity that persists over a period, but does not have a time dimension in itself. Persistent items are characterized by events (temporal entities) that add a time dimension to a persistent item. For example the event "birth" characterizes the beginning of the existence of a person (a person is a persistent item).

Properties: Properties are connections between entity classes. Properties link entities together. For example, a person is linked, via the property "has gender", with the class "gender".

Subclass: A subclass is inferior to its parent class. For example "ship" is a subclass of "man-made object". When X is a subclass of Y it inherits all the properties of the class Y. What is more, a subclass can have additional properties compared to its parent class. In other words, it can be linked to ship-specific classes. For example, a ship might be linked to a "ship voyage" or to people that acted as its crew.

Temporal entity: A temporal entity is an event with a time dimension. Temporal entities characterize persistent items (entities without time dimension). For example, the temporal entity "birth" characterizes the beginning of existence of a person (persistent item).

Type: A type is similar to a subclass. For example, "nickname" is a type of "naming". Note that by definition all types of a specific class share the same properties.