Construction and role of the ontology for creating digital archives of architectural material

Abstract

　We constructed digital archive of architectural material of Seitaro Tsuboi house which was built in Tokyo 1923. However, the architectural material contains many technical terms and a large number of names of people and organizations. If we did not clarify the relationship among the original, the digital archive would not make it easy to understand the relationship among the material. As a result, we developed an ontology concerning the knowledge information described in the architectural documents, and created archive based on the ontology. Application of ontology is prominent in industrial, medical, and legal fields, but there are few cases where it has been applied to historical material. Consequently, this paper explains the merits of ontology developing in the digital archiving of historical material.