Contribution of Conceptual Modeling to Enhancing Historians' Intuition -Application to Prosopography

Historians, and in particular researchers in prosopography, focus a lot of\neffort on extracting and coding information from historical sources to build\ndatabases. To deal with this situation, they rely in some cases on their\nintuition. One important issue is to provide these researchers with the\ninformation extracted from the sources in a sufficiently structured form to\nallow the databases to be queried and to verify, and possibly, to validate\nhypotheses. The research in this paper attempts to take up the challenge of\nhelping historians capturing and assessing information throughout automatic\nprocesses. The issue emerges when too many sources of uncertain information are\navailable. Based on the high-level information fusion approach, we propose a\nprocess that automatically supports historians' intuition in the domain of\nprosopography. The contribution is threefold: a conceptual data model, a\nprocess model, and a set of rules combining the reliability of sources and the\ncredibility of information.\n