Abstract:

The “Documentary Archaeology of Late Medieval Europe” (DALME) is a publicly accessible database of material culture based on the textual sources from later medieval Europe. The goal of the project is to increase our understanding of Europe’s material horizons at the outset of the modern globalizing economy. The project accomplishes this objective by developing a fully searchable online collection of household or estate inventories from many European regions between the years 1250 and 1500. Within three years, we expect the collection to include several thousand inventories and at least 100,000 individual items. 

A significant component of the DALME environment is a lexicon of material culture comprising smaller lexicons in all the relevant languages. In the database, the headwords within each of these lexicons is aggregated at a semantic level by linking them to concepts in a controlled vocabulary. For this we use, and extend where necessary, the Getty Thesaurus of Art and Architecture. The poster we propose will situate DALME's use of linked open data within the larger scope of the DALME project and outline the contributions DALME might make to the Getty's current lexicon.