The
Historical
Event
Markup and
Linking project
provides a means of coordinating and navigating
disparate historical materials on the internet. It includes
- an XML schema for historical events which describes the events’ participants,
dates, location and keywords; the schema associates these with
source materials in print or on the web.- XSLT stylesheets that
combine conforming documents and generate lists, maps and
graphical timelines out of them.
This is way, way cool. In the future, academic historians will not simply write long dissertations which no one but other historians ever read. They will also structure their knowledge into a format like HEML which will can be fed to tools like the ones these folks are building for use in K-12 schools or by autodidacts.
If it still sounds too abstract, check out the examples on the home page. It’s clearly a work in progress, but the potentials are pretty amazing.
