Modeling Concept Drift for Historical Research in the Digital Humanities

In Digital Humanities one often needs to deal with the modeling of con- cept drift, i.e., the mechanism underlying changes in concepts' intensions. This particularly applies to historical research, e.g., when experts study changes in lan- guage or entire conceptual frameworks. The purpose of the paper is to address some challenges concerning the ontological modeling of both concepts and concept drift. We sketch an initial formal approach which allows to consider the temporal dimension of concept characterization and, consequently, temporal relations between multiple concepts. This eventually leads us to discuss some preliminaries ideas on the formal treatment of experts' intentional attitudes towards the transmission and manipulation of concepts inherited from the past.