Advancing frances: New Heritage Textual Ontology, Enhanced Knowledge Graphs, and Refined Search Capabilities

This paper presents significant enhancements to the frances platform, incorporating the Heritage Textual Ontology (HTO), advanced knowledge graphs, and sophisticated search capabilities, along with innovative data visualization methods. The HTO integrates diverse historical collections and unifies various sources. Leveraging this ontology, the new knowledge graphs connect data across different sources and editions, linking to external resources like Wikipedia and Dbpedia to enrich semantic relationships. We employed deep-learning-based spell correction for OCR error correction. Enhanced search functionalities, powered by Elasticsearch and semantic technologies, enable precise retrieval and analysis. Additionally, new data visualization approaches offer multifaceted interpretations of search results. A case study tracking slavery references in historical editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica 1768-1860 demonstrates the platform’s effectiveness in analyzing historical text and validating frances’s capabilities.