Knowledge Acquisition from Historical Documents for Preserving Transylvanian Cultural Heritage

This paper proposes a solution for preserving the cultural heritage by performing knowledge acquisition from historical documents. We developed a system that gathers knowledge by processing the content of historical documents to enable knowledge retrieval as response to ontologically-guided queries. Knowledge acquisition, one of the main workflows in our system, aims to semantically annotate the content of historical documents and to enrich the domain ontology through lexical annotation and knowledge extraction processes. We use two types of rules in knowledge extraction, one dealing with extracting the relevant information from the documents' content and another one for mapping the extracted information to ontology concepts and properties. Our work was validated on documents available in the Cluj County National Archives addressing the Transylvanian medieval history