The IMAGO project: towards a knowledge base of medieval and renaissance geographical works

The image of the world created by the Medieval and Renaissance culture was crucial to the development of Western thought in European history. To the best of our knowledge Medieval and Renaissance geographical works have not been studied using digital methods. The three years (2020-2023) Italian National research project IMAGO - Index Medii Aevi Geographiae Operum - aims at providing a systematic overview of this literature using Semantic Web technologies. As the first step to develop tools to support scholars in creating, evolving and consulting a knowledge base (KB) of the geographical works, we created an OWL 2 DL ontology. Following the re-use logic and to maximize the interoperability, we developed the ontology as an extension of two reference ontologies, that is the CIDOC CRM vocabulary and its extension FRBRoo, including its in-progress reformulation, LRMoo. In this paper, we present the project, the ontology and the tool to populate it that we developed. Furthermore, we present a preliminary study to map the works collected in the IMAGO KB and the manuscripts stored in the KB of the Mapping Manuscript Migrations project.