Discover
The Notarypedia project started in 2018 as a partnership between the University of Malta, the Notarial Archives, the Notarial Archives Foundation and the Office of the Notary to Government . It is being supported by the Ministry for Justice, Equality and Governance.
What is Notarypedia?
The Notarypedia Project is an ambitious and far-reaching project using Artificial Intelligence to make our past more accessible. It is intended to revolutionise the way we experience Maltese history and culture by building a knowledge graph from notarial documents that span hundreds of years.
Notarypedia Preview
The research and development of Notarypedia is an ongoing endevour. This first preview includes three notarial manuscripts transcribed by Professor Stanley Fiorini. These are the only complete set of transcribed and published manuscripts from the collection dating back to the 15th century, with a total of 981 deeds.
The Vision
The vision behind Notarypedia is to build a complete knowledge representation from the thousands of manuscripts found in the Notarial Archives. This is an important collaboration effort involving different stages and cutting edge research that will result in new releases of Notarypedia. Watch this space!!
About Notarypedia
The Notarial Archives were set up by Grand Master Lascaris in virtue of an instrument dated 10th July 1640. The earliest documented reference to notarial practice in Malta dates back to 1270 while the oldest volume of notarial deeds preserved in the Archives is that of Notary Paolo Bonello which dates from 1465 to 1521.
The Archives are a rich source of historical research whereby notarial deeds and records are frequently examined and studied mainly for their legal implications to for instance establish the root of title to a property, to trace inheritances, and generally for checking on legal rights and duties as regulated by written covenants. The Notarypedia project intends to make these archives more easily searchable and accesible to researchers, educators and the general public.
Knowledge Graph Creation
The main research aims behind the Notarypedia project is that of automatically extracting knowledge from notarial manuscripts written in Latin and to represent this knowledge as a Knowledge Graph. This Knowledge Graph leverages on the Notarial Ontology (NO) for the semantic modelling of the notarial domain.
Knowledge Extraction
Knowledge is automatically extracted using different Machine Learning techniques and consists of information about people (e.g. Nobilis Andrea de Caxaro) and places (e.g. Turri de Haseui), as well as different types of relations (geneological, geographical, descriptional or transactional) associated with the type of deed (debitum, vendicio, apoca or dos).
Knowledge Completion
As more manuscripts are digitised, this content will be made available through Notarypedia. The system is being developed to leverage on advanced AI technologies and to scale up to handle the massive knowledge that will be created.
Notarypedia Facts
Notarypedia through numbers
Notarial Registers
Notaries
Notarypedia Triples
Volunteers
Publications
In this paper we discuss how we used a collection of Latin notarial transcribed manuscripts, to extend the work presented earlier by focusing on relation extraction and the creation of the NotaryPedia Knowledge Graph (NKG).
Charlene Ellul, Joel Azzopardi, Charlie Abela
On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems, OTM 2019 Conferences, Rhodes, Greece.
Notarypedia is an exciting project aimed at automatically mining data from historical Notarial Acts and uses a scalable approach to store this data.
Charlene Ellul, Joel Azzopardi, Charlie Abela
Council of the Notaries of Europe (CNUE) 2019.
In this paper, Machine Learning techniques are proposed and implemented to extract entities such as people, place names, dates, deed types and keywords from historical notarial manuscripts.
Charlene Ellul, Joel Azzopardi, Charlie Abela
Collaboration
NotaryPedia Team
The Team from the Department of Artificial Intelligence at University of Malta
Charlie Abela
Department of Artificial Intelligence University of Malta
Joel Azzopardi
Department of Artificial Intelligence University of Malta
Charlene Ellul
Department of Artificial Intelligence University of MaltaContact Us
If you have any questions about the Notarypedia Project, want to get involved, or are interested in supporting us, get in touch with us:
Address
Notarial Archives,24, St. Christopher Street,
Valletta, Malta