Women’s Roles in the Family: An Ontological Representation
Abstract
Although empirical family research recognises motherhood, marital roles, and daughterhood as analytically distinct, the scholarly literature still lacks a formally engineered, machine-readable model that links these constructs to primary textual evidence. We address this gap by developing a domain ontology from a curated corpus of 64 canonical texts (≈ 30 000 words). Following the NeOn methodology, we (i) elicited 64 competency questions, (ii) applied semantic-field analysis to derive a controlled vocabulary, and (iii) formalised the resulting concepts and relations in OWL. The finished ontology contains 150 classes, 18 object properties, and 11 annotation properties, all verified for logical consistency with the HermiT reasoner. A two-stage evaluation combined automated metrics with expert review. On a stratified sample of 120 queries, the ontology-driven retrieval pipeline achieved a mean average precision of 0.87—an 89 % improvement over a keyword baseline (0.46). Domain specialists further confirmed that the model supplies the contextual information needed for nuanced interpretation of each role. The ontology is released under an open licence and can be consumed directly by SPARQL endpoints or embedded in digital-humanities workflows. By offering a rigorously validated, extensible representation of women’s family roles, the resource lowers barriers to reproducible research and paves the way for comparative studies across languages and cultures.
Keywords: ontology engineering; women’s family roles; knowledge representation; semantic retrieval; digital humanities.
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