This article considers the use of semantic web technologies in the context of everyday historians. It deduces from theoretical considerations needs for the actual implementation of a digital edition. It explains some of the basic concepts of the semantic web more extensively than necessary for the digital humanities scholar already familiar with these technologies. I’ve argued elsewhere why a digital edition can be considered the best method to publish economic records as historical sources. It discusses first discusses the drawbacks of reducing digital edition of accounts and economic records to the encoding offered by the TEI. I will compare the text oriented approach of the TEI with other digital representations of accounts that are oriented primarily on the economic facts accounted. The second part of the article discusses the opportunities offered by the usage of semantic web technologies (RDF, RDFs/OWL, SKOS and SPARQL) to encode and expose the content layer of digital editions. I have described elsewhere in more detail my own proposal how a customized XML/TEI transcription can be transformed into a XML serialisation of RDF facts, and there are other projects interlacing RDF structures into TEI. This article focus on an introduction into the semantic web technologies as proposed by the W3C and discusses how they can be applied to historical accounts as a common data model, for the creation of controlled vocabularies, in exposing the content layer over the web, and for querying data aggregated from several sources. The final part of the article exemplifies the whole set of methods on data extracted from existing digital editions of late medieval accounts. The presented in this paper is part the MEDEA activities funded by DFG and NEH
