Theoretical Model
In the theoretical model we established the exact features that we needed to represent our idea. We started from the E/R model and enriched it with new properties in natural language. Generally, we aimed to give to the user a full and interconnected picture of our phenomenon, so we intertwined people, places, dates and concepts with our objects.
Who
Our approach was to emphasize the fact that printing revolution was carried out by people. Therefore we wanted to properly describe each person involved in some kind of relationship with the objects of our collection and with some other person relevant for the Printing Revolution, in a way that could give us a certain degree of freedom in defining these relations. For this reason, we also thinked about some subfields to determine the nature of the relation and a significant date. Of course, we kept in mind to provide some general information: name, gender, date and place of birth and death, a small biography, religion and topics of interest, just to give a quick presentation of the person.
Where
We decided to focus on the place of creation of our objects, we though to provide basic information about the location: name and alternative name, country, coordinates. Since we were talking about an historical process, we also had the idea to express the name (and eventually other features like the belonging to a certain political entity) that our place held during a certain year or period (that could be, in our case, the year of creation of an item).
When
About the date of creation of the resource, we thought we would need a date format (we chose ISO 8601), but the only date did not fulfil our need of connecting data. So we agreed to represent a relation between our date and a resource from our collection. Finally, to put all the information into a broader time context, we considered to specify the historical period in which the date falls into.
What
We decided to focus more on an abstract concept extracted from our items than on their explicit semantic content. We would then present our concept with a name, the related topic, a brief description and contextualized it inside space/time coordinates, as to broaden the information in a wider historical context.