A Genealogy Ontology Containing Turkish Kinship Terms for Traditional Families

Abstract

Today, with the innovations brought by technology, many information, official documents, correspondence, and evaluation data kept in archives have been transferred to digital environment. One of the areas where the digitalization process has started and continues rapidly is population and registry information. However, the existing systems are sometimes insufficient to present the log information clearly. Existing systems used in relevant government institutions and libraries can only present kinship ties in a hierarchical structure due to the lack of necessary infrastructure resources. The family tree created is insufficient to establish parallel relationships. However, it is obvious that in most judicial and institutional cases, it will shed light on the current situation in parallel kinship relations. In addition, existing genealogies are insufficient to reveal semantic patterns between the concepts of family, person, place, time, and event while listing kinship relations. In addition to all these, the existence of cultural differences between nations and the expression of kinship relations with different terms require the definition of a common family tree. In this study, semantic web technologies, ontologies, and related data, which have been widely used in many fields in recent years, are structured to provide a clearer conceptualization of kinship relations. The study also discusses the alignment and reusability of the developed genealogical ontology with upper-level ontologies so that it can be used more broadly.