摘要：Human Beings love to collect, store and preserve documents for later exploration leading to the creation of Archives. Actually, to consult municipal archives' asset, seeking information in order to explore the knowledge implicit in their documents, is the main reason for the existence of those memory institutions. On the other hand, it is known that the movement of people from dispersed living to concentration in urban environments has a strong impact both in human civilization and in the environment. This statement motivates Social Science researchers to study of urban evolution of cities. In this context and having noticed that Fafe's Archive holds an important collection of municipal records (since XIX Century) concerning the application for authorization to construct or reconstruct private or public buildings, it came up to our minds to create a digital repository with those documents enabling their analysis. An information system shall be developed around it for information retrieval and knowledge exploration; it is also desirable that this application provides features to visualize the information extracted in convenient ways, like positioning buildings over a map. This paper discusses the development of the referred Web-based system to study the Urban Evolution of Fafe in the XIX and XX Centuries, focussing on the ontology created to understand the domain to be explored. The definition of a markup language (as a XML dialect), to annotate the Archive documents in order to enable the automatic data extraction and the semantic search, is also one of the paper topics. It will be discussed that this annotation was not defined from the scratch; instead, its design followed the ontology. It is actually an ontology-driven system. At last, the state of the Web interface (the system front-end) so far developed will be presented.
关键词：Urban Evolution; Urban Research; Urban morphology; Ontology; XML
