Representation of Historical Sources on the Semantic Web by Means of Attempto Controlled English

The paper discusses some promising approaches to the representation of the meta-information and the meaning of historical sources on the Semantic Web in order to provide researchers with appropriate tools for data capturing, semantic linkage of information, and automatic logical inference. It is desirable that the meaning of the sources is represented fully to aggregate their internal information within a definite semantic network and to link this information with the external data provided by ontologies. The authors propose to use controlled natural languages-namely, Attempto Controlled English (ACE)-to represent the meaning of historical sources on the Semantic Web. In the paper, both actual and potential possibilities of ACE in the representation of the contents of Old Russian charters are examined; therefore, a special attention is paid to ACE tools, especially to ACE Reasoner (RACE).