Advancing ARKs in the Historical Ontology Space

Abstract

This paper presents the application of Archival Resource Keys (ARKs) for persistent identification and resolution of concepts in historical ontologies. Our use case is the 1910 Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), which we have converted to the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) format and will use for representing a corpus of historical Encyclopedia Britannica articles. We report on the steps taken to assign ARKs in support of the Nineteenth-Century Knowledge Project, where we are using the HIVE vocabulary tool to automatically assign subject metadata from both the 1910 LCSH and the contemporary LCSH faceted, topical vocabulary to enable the study of the evolution of knowledge.