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Ontology · version 1.2

LACRIMALit Ontology of Crisis

An event-centred model of crisis in Greek and Roman antiquity.

Seventeenth-century painting of a plague in an ancient city
Plague in an Ancient City, Michiel Sweerts and workshop · public domain contextual image

Select a documented event to connect its chronology, geography, agents and ontology relationships.

Interactive crisis atlas

The records, dates, agents and place names come from the published LACRIMALit ontology. Map coordinates provide geographic orientation.

Historical timeline

Bars show duration; points show events recorded in a single year. Select any row to inspect the record on the map.

Current ontology Info
78Classes
26Object properties
6Data properties
139Individuals

Current repository documentation for version 1.2. The 2022 article describes an earlier, larger working snapshot.

Overview

LACRIMALit models crisis as an event rather than as a subject heading.

An event changes a cultural, social or physical system. It connects agents, places, dates, causes, consequences and sub-events.

Six crisis spheres organise the model: environmental, financial, migrant, military, political and public health.

The ontology was developed by the LACRIMALit project (2022–2025), funded by HFRI and hosted at IMS-FORTH.

Scope

Period covered5th century BCE – 2nd century CE
RegionGreco-Roman world
Modelled asOntology
LanguagesEnglish, Ancient Greek, Modern Greek
Built withProtégé; spreadsheet data imported with the Cellfie plugin
SourcesHerodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Plutarch, Arrian; texts via Perseus Digital Library

Access the data

Query it through the SPARQL endpoint using this named graph:

https://triplestore.talos-ai4ssh.uoc.gr:8890/datasets/LACRIMALit-Modeling-Events-Classical-Period-v1

Ways in

The .owl file opens in Protégé and can be visualised with WebVOWL.

Example queries

What are the political crisis types?

PREFIX rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#>
PREFIX lac:  <http://ontologia.fr/OTB/lac#>
SELECT DISTINCT ?crisisName
WHERE {
  ?crisis rdfs:subClassOf* lac:Political_Crisis .
  ?crisis rdfs:label ?crisisName .
  FILTER (lang(?crisisName) = 'en')
}
ORDER BY ?crisisName

This is the first of six competency questions the ontology was built to answer. It returns the political crisis types: civil war, conspiracy, coup d'état, defection, exile, murder, ostracism, revolt, sedition and others.

Size & structure

Current repository, version 1.2

Classes78
Individuals139
Object properties26
Data properties6
Annotation properties20
Datatypes7

Published 2022 snapshot

The journal article reports approximately 4,500 triples, 1,500 declaration axioms, 110 classes, 44 object properties, 16 data properties and 460 individuals. These figures describe the version analysed in the paper, not the current repository summary.

Citation & licence

Cite as

Papadopoulou, M., Roche, C., & Tamiolaki, E.-M. (2022).
The LACRIMALit Ontology of Crisis: An Event-Centric Model for Digital History.
Information, 13(8), 398. https://doi.org/10.3390/info13080398

DOI: 10.3390/info13080398

Licence

CC BY 4.0 (ontology repository). The published article is separately licensed by the journal.

Funding

Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (HFRI), through the LACRIMALit project (2022–2025).

Credits

Maria PapadopoulouAuthor
ORCID 0000-0001-6451-8712
Christophe RocheAuthor
ORCID 0000-0002-0756-0559
Melina-Eleni TamiolakiAuthor
ORCID 0000-0001-7215-4701

LISTIC, Université Savoie Mont Blanc; IMS-FORTH; Department of Philology, University of Crete

Image sources & licences

Images are resized for display; some views use CSS cropping. Original files and pre-existing edits are documented at the source links.