Developing an ontology network about meteorological events from historical newspapers

Abstract Currently, only a few people would deny the value of newspaper content for understanding issues associated with politics, culture, and society. Therefore, the digitalization of the newspapers’ archives allows retrieving outstanding historical and cultural articles. However, there is a large amount of “minor data” hidden within these newspapers. This paper addresses the challenge for accessing and dealing with the resources of National newspaper and periodicals libraries from Colombia, Ecuador, México and Uruguay, which collect newspapers where news about meteorological events from the XIX-XX centuries were posted. A news corpus is developed on these newspapers, which through technical readings and a bibliomining process using different tools allow building an ontology network. This network is composed of different modules (technical, general and news), which are built using different approaches (top-down and bottom-up) and methodologies (Methontology and NeOn), for providing a common and sharing understanding of the historical meteorological events in Latin America. Hence, this work entails an approach to take the newspaper and periodicals libraries to Semantic Web.