Logika i povijesne znanosti - problem rekonstrukcije obitelji na temelju matičnih knjiga
Logic and historical research – the problem of the family tree reconstruction based on the old parish registers

Summary/Abstract: Family tree reconstruction from the older parish registers is one of the hardest problems in historical demography. Formalization or formal logical modeling could be the foundation for computer-based processing of the data, which would help and improve such historical research. For the analysis of 18th century parish registers, among many possible logical systems, event calculus is selected because of its ability to represent temporal data and rules in the most convenient way. Formal model that represents the most of the biological, legal and traditional laws and regularities of the family relations is developed. The model is applied on the sample of 18th century parish books from Osijek, and the results are compared with the manually reconstructed family relations. The completeness of the model is over 90%, i.e. model has generated 90% of manually generated relations. However, precision of the model is much lower what implies the need of additional historiographers interpretation of the data.

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