When NLP is used to support research in the humanities, new methodological issues come into play. NLP methods may introduce a bias in their analysis that can influence the results of the hypothesis a humanities scholar is testing. This paper addresses this issue in the context of BiographyNet a multi-disciplinary project involving NLP, Linked Data and history. We introduce the project to the NLP community. We argue that it is essential for historians to get insight into the provenance of information, including how information was extracted from text by NLP tools.

This paper presents an overview of the work in progress at the W3C to produce a conversion of WordNet to the RDF/OWL representation language in use in the Semantic Web community. Such a standard representation is useful to provide application developers a high-quality resource and to promote interoperability. Important requirements in this conversion process are that it should be complete and should stay close to WordNet's conceptual model. The paper explains the steps taken to produce the conversion and details design decisions such as the composition of the class hierarchy and properties, the addition of suitable OWL semantics and the chosen format of the URIs. Additional topics include a strategy to incorporate OWL and RDFS semantics in one schema such that both RDF(S) infrastructure and OWL infrastructure can interpret the information correctly, problems encountered in understanding the Prolog source files and the description of the two versions that are provided (Basic and Full) to accommodate different usages of WordNet.