Modeling Historical Social Networks Databases

Historical social networks are analyzed using prosopographical methods. Prosopography is a branch of historical research that focuses on the iden-tification of social networks that appear in historical sources. It aims to represent and to interpret histori-cal data, sourced from texts. Conceptual modeling imparts the capability to process these large data sets. This paper outlines a conceptual approach to design-ing a prosopographical database encompassing un-certainty. Our contribution is threefold: i) a generic certainty-based prosopographical conceptual model; ii) two meta-models with a mapping between them; iii) an illustrative example generating a customized pros-opographical relational model. Unlike past ap-proaches, our design process helps us to integrate disparate points of view as expressed in the proso-pography community. We apply our approach to the prosopographical database Studium Parisiense dedi-cated to members of Paris schools and university be-tween the twelfth and sixteenth centuries. This instan-tiation validates the usefulness of our approach

Conceptual Modeling of Prosopographic Databases Integrating Quality Dimensions

International audienceProsopographic databases, which allow the study of social groups through their bibliography, are used today by a significant number of historians. Computerization has allowed intensive and large-scale exploitation of these databases. The modeling of these proposopographic databases has given rise to several data models. An important problem is to ensure a level of quality of the stored information. In this article , we propose a generic data model allowing to describe most of the existing prosopographic databases and to enrich them by integrating several quality concepts such as uncertainty, reliability, accuracy or completeness