IHR Digital is very pleased to announce that we have been awarded funding by the Arts and Humanities Research Council for a new project called the Thesaurus of British and Irish History as SKOS (TOBIAS).

The IHR will publish as a web ontology the Bibliography of British and Irish History’s subject classification of 8,800 terms for British and Irish history. This will provide a comprehensive, standard resource for all British and Irish history projects wishing to expose their data and link it to other projects using the Resource Description Framework. The benefit of linked data is that it is possible to find data in that format which could not be found using conventional search. Web ontologies are linked together to form the framework of the ‘semantic web’, and the TOBIAS project aims to embed a rigorous vocabulary of British and Irish history into that framework.