Competency Questions

Enslaved.org Competency Questions, essentially search queries in natural language developed in collaboration with a team of scholars of slavery, serve multiple purposes. First they express the requirements of our data model. Second, they helped the Enslaved.org team build the ontology. Finally Enslaved.org has used these questions to test the ontology and the capabilities of the Enslaved.org discovery hub. Enslaved.org has created queries to test the presuppositions that underlay the Competency Questions. In this way, the questions -- and our testing of them -- tell us if the Enslaved.org Ontology includes the necessary classes and properties to link effectively and query historic slave trade data meaningfully.

We would like to acknowledge the following people who contributed to the development of the Enslaved.org Competency Questions:

David Eltis (Emory University), Gwendolyn Midlo Hall (Rutgers University), Paul LaChance (University of Ottawa), Keith McClelland (University College London), Steven J. Niven (Harvard University), Dean Rehberger (Michigan State University), Daryle Williams (University of Maryland), and Walter Hawthorne (Michigan State University)