MCKG: A Community-Driven Knowledge Graph on Medieval Charters

Tracking #: 4051-5265

This paper is currently under review
Authors: 
Jorge Álvarez-Fidalgo
Enrique Rodriguez-Martin
Jose Emilio Labra-Gayo

Responsible editor: 
Guest Editors 2025 OD+CH

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Dataset Description
Abstract: 
Medieval charters constitute primary sources for understanding medieval societies, yet their analysis remains a labor-intensive process reliant on domain experts, leaving extensive digitized collections insufficiently analyzed. To address this challenge, we present the Medieval Charters Knowledge Graph (MCKG), a Wikibase-based dataset that integrates expert annotations and computationally extracted information from medieval charters within a provenance-aware framework designed to support collaborative curation and future community participation. The dataset relies on a hybrid data model that combines elements from CIDOC-CRM and the Wikidata data model to capture the complex legal, social, and biographical relationships in medieval charters. A standardized integration pipeline enables the transformation of annotated corpora into structured RDF data and facilitates scalable corpus ingestion into the MCKG. We demonstrate the dataset by populating the MCKG with a corpus of Spanish medieval charters and answering SPARQL-based competency questions that illustrate its analytical potential for historical research.
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