BZKO: An Ontology for the Card Index of German Post-War Compensation Records

2026-08-07

AI Summary

This study addresses the challenges of semantic representation and reuse of the Central Federal Card Index within post-war German reparations archives. To tackle this, the authors propose a modular two-layer ontology architecture that decouples domain semantics—grounded in the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) realist framework—from interoperability structures aligned with established standards such as RiC-O, PROV-O, and PiCo. This design ensures logical rigor while enabling effective semantic integration and knowledge graph construction in digital humanities infrastructures. The resulting BZKO ontology not only facilitates robust semantic modeling of historical archival data but also establishes a foundation for incorporating spatiotemporal uncertainty in future extensions.

Abstract

The Central Federal Card Index (Bundeszentralkartei) of Germany is a key archival resource documenting compensation claims submitted by victims of National Socialist persecution and their relatives, within the German Wiedergutmachung process. To enable semantically enriched representation, integration, and reuse of this historically significant collection, we present the BZK Ontology (BZKO). We propose a two-layer ontology for historical archival data that separates ontologically grounded domain semantics from interoperability-oriented extension constructs. The approach combines BFO-based realism with archival standards (RiC-O, PROV-O, PiCo), enabling provenance-preserving semantic integration, while maintaining logical rigor, modularity, and reuse across digital humanities infrastructures. The proposed approach establishes a reusable semantic foundation for the integration of Wiedergutmachung archival materials into digital humanities infrastructures and lays the groundwork for future knowledge graph generation, ontology validation, and the incorporation of additional historical entities and uncertain temporal and spatial information. The ontology is available on https://github.com/ISE-FIZKarlsruhe/bzko.

Problem

• ontology
• archival data
• semantic integration
• Wiedergutmachung
• digital humanities

Innovation

• ontology
• semantic integration
• digital humanities
• archival standards
• BFO