Building a Knowledge Base on Archival Creators at the National Archives of France: Issues, Methods, and Prospects

Abstract

The National Archives of France (NAF) aim to build a knowledge base, made of EAC-CPF files, on the entities (government ministries and agencies, public notaries, persons, families, and private corporate bodies) whose records they keep. This base, which already serves as a management tool and as an access point to finding aids in the NAF website, is very incomplete and must now be enriched. After analyzing the current situation, this article discusses the scientific issues of the project (the definition, scope, main objectives and data model of the base, its place in the NAF information system, the need to develop another base on functions), the methods to be used to carry it out as a collective operation, and some prospects concerning the interoperability of the base with other ones, its Resource Description Framework representation and its visualization.