The symogih.org project: a modular system for managing historical information

After many wonderful years of development, the symogih.org project has come to an end.
But the ambitious project of a collaborative and cumulative virtual research environment carried by the LARHRA's Digital History Research Team is not over. Find all the wealth of symogih.org and more in the Geovistory environment.

This website is preserved as scientific documentation.

The symogih.org project has developed a generic model for storing historical information to guarantee interoperability and allow selective publication. A collaborative historical research platform has been created based on this model which is used by a many researchers and projects.

This platform can be used to store primary data concerning all human activities (social, economic, intellectual, etc.), XML-encoded texts (processed in line with the standard proposed by the Text Encoding Initiative), and images and their metadata. The different objects can also be linked via their spatial footprint. The creation of a geographic information system (GIS) has played a key role in the project.

The platform is designed to enable:

• progressive and open-ended modelling of historical information thanks to a dictionary of knowledge units types;
• collaborative, accumulative, and constantly perfectible storage of data, texts, and images;
• detailed source references for each item of information;
• processing and consultation of data using existing software;
• selective publication of data on different websites dedicated to each project;
• publication of resource identifiers in the form of entities identified by a URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) using authority files which identify them;
• making some of the information available as linked data thanks to a SPARQL-endpoint.

Contact us