Post-doctoral position at IRIT - A semantic platform to manage historical territorial data CONTEXT When studying the Ancien Régime institutions and trying to understand the underlying mechanisms of the development of the modern State, historians have to deal with old categories of the State and civil society. Despite an illusory resemblance in vocabulary, these categories refer to different concepts. This is particularly true for the representation of what constitute a political territory. Whereas we remain bounded by geographical projections, such territories had no precise borders and were only progressively defined over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. ObARDI (the Ontology-based Ancien Régime Data Infrastructure) is cross-disciplinary project funded by the French ANR. ObARDI gathers historians, geographers, economists and computer scientists in order to better understand the dynamic relationships of power that presided over and fostered the constitution of the modern State without relying on these inherited categories. One of the key components of ObARDI is an innovative knowledge representation system of the dynamics of Ancien Régime institutions through the application of ontologies to historical data. ObARDI started in sept. 2021. The first year of the project was dedicated to assemble parts of an extensive database to represent the local institutional, economic, and social environment each former French commune of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century was embedded in. In parallel we designed the HHT ontology of hierarchically organized territorial units that manages their geography (Bourel /et al.,/ 2022) and that is able to track their evolution in time (Charles /et al.,/ 2023a et 2023b). The data about French local institutions is being integrated into a knowledge graph that will be the core of a fully-structured information system. The resulting environment should enable researchers in history and geography (1) to create innovative cartographic tools to represent Ancien Régime territories as an evolving set of layered institutions; (2) to materialize the boundaries of these territories either according to physical criteria or according to the power relationships among them; (3) to go back to the sources that provided this information; (4) to offer the ability to link these territories with historical data (like population) or events (such as riots). This infrastructure has to be compliant with FAIR data management principles in a Linked Open Data perspective: it will be interoperable and accessible through an ergonomic web platform, which will constitute a tool in fostering the use of the digital humanities across various public. More information about ObARDI project and early results can be found here: https://obardi.hypotheses.org/ MISSIONS The MELODI group offers a post-doctoral position for a researcher in semantic web, knowledge representation and digital humanities. The missions of the candidate will be the following: (1) to contribute to the ObARDI platform by providing services to manage the ontology and the project knowledge base. These services include to collect and store data about historical territories, to manage feed, query and browse an ontology-based graph of historical territories and events on these territories; a natural language query interface is expected, similar to the SPARNatural interface (https://sparna-git.github.io/sparnatural-demonstrateur-an/presentation-fr.html). Enriching the knowledge base will require an automatic population from printed documents, based on natural language processing. (2) to create a relation between the ontology, the knowledge base and innovative cartographic tools to represent Ancien Régime territories as an evolving set of layered institutions (3) to add standard metadata and open facilities and services so that this infrastructure be compliant with FAIR data management principles. (4) to contribute to represent and manage several historical datasets; to implement use-cases that will demonstrate that the platform meets users' needs and validates the hypotheses behind its design The candidate will also take part to the writing of project deliverables and scientific papers. Depending on the candidate skills, a priority will be defined among all the services to be implemented. EXPECTED EDUCATION AND SKILLS The candidate is expected to demonstrate a strong interest in digital humanities and cross-disciplinary work with historians. We are looking for a candidate with a PhD in computer science specializing either in digital humanities and semantic web technologies, geographic information system (GIS), natural language processing (NLP). Experience in digital humanities will be a plus. We would appreciate the candidate to master ontology languages, ontology engineering, linked data and knowledge graphs. The candidate should have good programming skills with a curiosity for human sciences. He/she should master technologies such as human computer interfaces, knowledge graph platforms, technologies such as OWL, RDF and RDFS, SPARQL and SHACL, but also geographic tools for map display. The candidate will work with 3 researchers from the MELODI group, as well as with historians and economist partners of the project. PRACTICAL INFORMATION *Start date*: as soon as possible, around 2 months after application. *End date*: dec. 2024 (end of the project) The *salary* will be between 2151 € net (2052 € after all taxes) and 3013 € net (2702 € after all taxes) depending on past experience. The employer will be Université Paul Sabatier Toulouse2 Jean Jaurès. *Work location*: MELODI group at IRIT - Université Paul Sabatier, 118 route de Narbonne 31062 Toulouse Cedex9 *Contact*: Nathalie Hernandez (hernande@irit.fr) or Nathalie Aussenac-Gilles (aussenac@irit.fr) *Application*: please send a full curriculum with a list of publications and a motivation letter by email to the contact persons. References (Bourel et al., 2022) L. Bourel, N. Hernandez, N. Aussenac-Gilles, W. Charles. HHT : une ontologie modulaire pour représenter l'évolution des territoires en Histoire. /33ème Journées Francophones d'Ingénierie des Connaissances (IC 2022)/, Jun 2022, Saint-Etienne, France. pp.131-136. (hal-03760559) (Charles et al., 2023a) W. Charles, N. Aussenac-Gilles, N. Hernandez. HHT: An Approach for Representing Temporally Evolving Historical Territories. /Proceedings of the Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2023/, Hersonissos (Gr), Jun 2023. (Charles et al., 2023b) W. Charles, N. Hernandez. HHT: An ontology to represent territorial dynamics for digital humanities. /International Conference On Formal Ontologies (FOIS 2023)/, Sherbrooke (Can), July 2023.