ITEM Eine Schnittstelle realienkundlicher Daten aus historischen Textquellen

Abstract

At the Institute for Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture (IMAREAL), the ‘ITEM’ research tool is designed to be an interface that makes two types of written sources—inventories and account books—accessible for comprehensive material culture queries. This tool enables users to explore and query objects and their attributes, such as materials, values, or contexts of use, from these two types of sources. Both types are systematically an­notated and supplemented with metadata to facilitate their integration into Linked Open Data (LOD) and, in the long term, to contribute to a shared semantic web of material culture data.

Due to the heterogeneity of these sources, thesauri and ontology are ‘mapped’ with the flexibility and funda­mental concept of extending this mapping to other source types as well. Here, LOD is understood not merely as a connection to controlled vocabularies but as a means of linking diverse data sets and projects within medieval studies, thus enabling a systematic exploration of various source types concerning material culture inquiries.