Creating digital scholarly editions of accounts and including references to a shared ontology in the markup can enable comparison of these historical sources using the affordances of the Semantic Web. Tomasek and Vogeler have been working separately for several years, exploring ways to use the Guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative as a first step in developing models for interoperable digital scholarly editions of accounts. “Transactionography,” an XML serialization of information found in accounts that Tomasek and her co-author Bauman proposed in 2013 is the model that grounds the markup for transactions from ancient Japan discussed by Kokaze, Goto, and Nagasaki in their presentation. Orlowska describes factors in choosing a model for producing editions of a large number of documents from widely dispersed archives that will contribute not only to a current project focus on reconstructing networks of annual fairs in late medieval and early modern Poland but also to future projects. And Vogeler demonstrates the value of recommendations for using a common bookkeeping ontology to facilitate interoperability of digital scholarly editions of accounts through the technologies of the semantic web.

Presenters on this panel participated in MEDEA activities funded through a Bilateral Digital Humanities award from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the German Research Foundation in 2015-2016. This project was supported jointly by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) is the central, self governing research funding organization that promotes research at universities and other publicly financed research institutions in Germany. The DFG serves all branches of science and the humanities by funding research projects and facilitating cooperation among researchers. The National Endowment for the Humanities is an independent grant-making agency of the United States government dedicated to supporting research, education, preservation, and public programs in the humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in these presentations do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities or the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.