Transforming the Vocabulaire de la Sigillographie into a Semantic Web Resource

This paper describes the current situation in the area of digital sigillography that focuses on creating data sets. It observes the possibility of aligning these data sets and suggests developing the Vocabulaire Internationale de la Sigillographie (created in 1990) further for this purpose. It presents the conversion of the printed version into an SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organisation System) resource. It highlights the opportunities offered by Semantic Web technologies, which can begin with sharing descriptive vocabularies. Data interchange between the various European sigillographic resources can be further promoted by shared semantics. This paper proposes a CIDOC-CRM-compliant OWL ontology built on top of the VIS. This is organized around the events of creating the matrix, applying the matrix, handling the impression (e.g., destroying, cutting off), conservation and description. The proposed basic entities map well to existing major seal databases, with the effect that the French Sigilla and the British DigiSig database could merge, and a common European database of medieval seals seems possible.