A vast area of research in historical science concerns the documentation and study of artefacts and related evidence. Current practice mostly uses spreadsheets or simple relational databases to organise the information as rows with multiple columns of related attributes. This form offers itself for data analysis and scholarly interpretation, however it also poses problems including i) the difficulty for collaborative but controlled documentation by a large number of users, ii) the lack of representation of the details from which the documented relations are inferred, iii) the difficulty to extend the underlying data structures as well as to combine and integrate data from multiple and diverse information sources, and iv) the limitation to reuse the data beyond the context of a particular research activity. To support historians to cope with these problems, in this paper we describe the Synthesis documentation system and its use by a large number of historians in the context of an ongoing research project in the field of History of Art. The system is Web-based and collaborative, and makes use of existing standards for information documentation and publication (CIDOC-CRM, RDF), focusing on semantic interoperability and the production of data of high value and long-term validity.

中文翻译：

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在历史研究中实现语义互操作性：用综合记录研究数据和知识

历史科学的一个广泛研究领域涉及人工制品和相关证据的记录和研究。目前的做法大多使用电子表格或简单的关系数据库将信息组织为具有多列相关属性的行。这种形式为数据分析和学术解释提供了自己，但它也带来了一些问题，包括 i) 大量用户协作但受控文档的困难，ii) 缺乏推断文档关系的细节的表示， iii) 扩展底层数据结构以及组合和整合来自多个不同信息源的数据的困难，以及 iv) 在特定研究活动的上下文之外重用数据的限制。为了支持历史学家解决这些问题，在本文中，我们描述了综合文献系统及其在艺术史领域正在进行的研究项目中被大量历史学家使用的情况。该系统基于网络和协作，并利用现有的信息文档和发布标准（CIDOC-CRM、RDF），侧重于语义互操作性和高价值和长期有效性数据的生产。