HistoryF

HistoryF is a standardized framework and software stack designed for encoding, storing, and querying historical information. It provides a common data model for events, persons and organizations (entities), places, times, sources, and provenance, with an emphasis on temporal precision and interoperability across archives, libraries, and research tools.

HistoryF originated from a collaborative effort among historians, archivists, and computer scientists in the early 2010s. The project released the first public specification, HistoryF Core, in 2016, with subsequent updates that extended the model to complex date representations, uncertain chronologies, and linked sources. The name HistoryF is shorthand for History Framework.

The data model centers on core entities such as Event, Entity, Place, and Source. Time is represented with timespans and supports uncertainty. Relationships capture connections among events and agents. The schema emphasizes provenance and citation, enabling traceability of all data to original sources. HistoryF favors JSON-LD serialization and provides adapters for REST and GraphQL queries; it also offers mappings to CIDOC CRM to support interoperability with established museum and archival standards.

In practice, HistoryF is implemented as open-source libraries in Python and JavaScript, along with tooling for ingestion, validation, and export. It includes connectors to major digital archives, TEI and EAD workflows, and simple pipelines to publish data to web portals or graph databases.

Governance is managed by the HistoryF Consortium, a community-led organization that coordinates development, standards, and documentation. The project is widely used in digital humanities courses and by memory institutions seeking reproducible histories, though some archivists caution that the model's flexibility can introduce complexity for newcomers.

Example: an encoding of the Battle of Hastings might be represented as an Event with label, date 1066-10-14, place Hastings, England, participants as linked Entity records, and primary sources cited with provenance metadata.