A Knowledge Graph of Medieval and Renaissance Geographical Works

Geographical works from the Middle Ages and Renaissance offer crucial insights into the cultural and intellectual landscapes of their time. However, digital scholarship in this domain remains fragmented, with key historical sources scattered across various physical and digital repositories. The Index Medii Aevi Geographiae Operum (IMAGO) project, conducted from 2020 to 2024, addresses this gap by building a semantically enriched, interoperable knowledge base focused on Latin geographical literature from the 6th to the 15th centuries. By combining expertise in medieval studies, philology, and Digital Humanities, IMAGO employs Semantic Web technologies and a dedicated ontology extending CIDOC CRM, FRBRoo, and LRMoo. The project facilitates data integration and reuse through Linked Open Data (LOD) principles, enhancing the discoverability and interoperability of cultural heritage data. A key goal of the project was to analyse the collected data. Six main knowledge extraction targets were defined, and corresponding SPARQL queries were developed to retrieve relevant information from the knowledge graph. These queries showcase the IMAGO infrastructure’s potential for data retrieval and deeper scholarly analysis. Finally, a user-friendly web application further enables access to the knowledge base via interactive maps, dynamic tables, and exportable formats.