Creation and online publication of a historic repository of France under the Ancien Régime (2016…)

Built initially by indexing data produced by projects conducted by l’IReMus (programme Mercure galant) et du Centre de recherche du château de Versailles (primarily its biographical database), this data repository is intended to be enriched with the aim of offering the Social and Human Sciences community a tool that will facilitate the interoperability of data produced by the many projects undertaken with reference to France under the Ancien Régime.

The concepts are organised into three main categories:
• people’s names,
• institutions; corporations, guilds and associations; religious congregations,
• places,
with the aim of enabling structured aggregation of all the different semantic occurrences associated with these concepts.

The opportunities for interoperability provided by such classification, which allows the data to be standardised without erasing its heterogeneous nature, have been increased by aligning the data for people’s names withVIAF, l’ISNI et data.bnf, for places with Geonames.org et Des villages de Cassini aux communes d’aujourd’hui and for institutions related to the royal houses with “Prosocour”.

Thus L’IReMus et le CRCV have developed a semantic infrastructure for the management of historical scientific data based on CIDOC-CRM ontology that will be accessible both by means of a public access point SPARQL and an Internet interface that will enable a theme-based, historical and geographical exploration of the repository.

Team

• Nathalie Berton-Blivet, research engineer (CNRS - IReMus) and project Manager;
• Thomas Bottini, engineer in charge of conceptual modeling, technical coordination and software development (CNRS - IReMus, since 2019);
• Rebecca Bristow, digital humanities engineer / semantic management of research data (Sorbonne Université contract) (September 2020-July 2022);
• Antoine Lebrun, web developer engineer (Sorbonne Université contract, since May 2022);
• Isabelle Pluvieux, responsible for databases (Centre de recherche du château de Versailles, since 2018).

• Trainee Centre de recherche du château de Versailles (2022-2023) : Maëva Tarantini;
• Trainees IReMus, programme Mercure galant (2021): Jeanne Fresné, Marianna Giffey, Daniela Matrain.

• Marie Carlin, digital project manager (Centre de recherche of the château de Versailles, 2016-2017);
• Thomas Soury, postdoctoral researcher (LabEx OBVIL: Observatoire de la vie littéraire, 2016-2017).