The Use of XML to Create a Historical Knowledge Base

Since conventional historical records have been written assuming human readers, they are not well- suited for computers to collect and process automatically. If computers could understand descriptions in historical records and process them automatically, it would be easy to analyze them from different perspectives. In this paper, we review a number of existing frameworks used to describe historical events, and make a comparative assessment of these frameworks in terms of usability, based on "deep cases" of Fillmore\´s core grammar. Based on this assessment, we propose a new description framework, and have created a microformat vocabulary set suitable for that framework. Also the paper describes an exploratory work on how to describe inter-event relationship.