Recognising and Tracking Events on the Web and in Real Life

This paper presents research in the context of two multidisciplinary projects aimed at facilitating the history domain with an automatic approach for event extraction and modelling. To realise this, the Semantics of History project is providing a historical ontology and a lexicon to support the detection of historical events in textual data whilst the Agora project focusses on exploring the modelling aspects of historical events and employing the combined results in an event-driven browse and search approach. Furthermore, the historical events are used as a flexible model to identify semantically relevant relationships between objects in highly diverse museum collections, creating meaningful ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ links along the key event dimensions ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘where’ and ‘when’. This should finally support the (re)interpretation process of history research, by allowing end-users to create their own personal narratives, leading to theoretical reflection on the meaning of digitally mediated public history in contemporary society. In this paper, we give a high-level overview of the research challenges in the realisation of a desired search and browse scenario. Finally, we outline the open issues and future research.