Scientific Instrument Makers and Events Ontology, SIMEOn

SIMEOn (Scientific Instrument Makers and Events Ontology) is an ontology designed to model data about the lives and work of scientific instrument makers. It was created to represent data in the legacy SIMON (Scientific Instrument Makers, Observations and Notes) database of makers in Britain and Ireland, 1550-1914, held by Royal Museums Greenwich. The Tools of Knowledge project (UKRI AH/T013400/1) remodelled this data semantically for presentation in a database on the Arches platform. It is modelled with reference to the events-based CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CIDOC CRM https://cidoc-crm.org/) but with considerable additional nuance in order to capture the level of detail included in the data. It is envisaged that the ontology may provide a useful resource or point of reference for other datasets that seek to model prosopographical data on trades and enterprises, including business genealogies, particularly where this activity can be associated with its material products.