The common approach to research in History and Archaeology
tends to the continuous development of new databases, completely
independent of each other with the consequence of data fragmentation,
atomisation of knowledge, and ultimately the creation of data silos. This
happens because of academic tradition, but also because these disciplines
work with fragmented information to understand historical data,
the contexts, which enables the creation of multiple narratives and interpretations.
However, for these disciplines, the context is a key aspect
that always should be preserved.
The Memórias Paroquiais (Parish Memories) correspond to a survey,
organized in 3 major parts (land, mountain and river) and are an essential
source for obtaining a radiography of Portugal in 1758-1761. We believe
that this primary source could reach a new exponent if worked from a
different approach: semantically annotated, processed and modeled.
We propose that the Portuguese Parish Memories, due to their intrinsic
characteristics, should constitute a Knowledge Base (KB) to connect
with other historical sources and research outputs. Ultimately, the Parish
Memories could be a Gold Standard for the Natural Language Processing
with impact on the research on other historical sources of Early Modern
History Portugal, regardless of the knowledge domain.This work is funded by national funds through the Foundation for Science and
Technology, under the project UIDB/00057/202