The 2020-Systematic, Multilingual Categorisation of Policeymaterien for Early Modern Police Ordinances: Simple Knowledge Organisation System with Uniform Resource Identifiers

In 2021 the Max-Planck-Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory published the database of the Policeyordnungen der Frühen Neuzeit. It contains information based upon over 200,000 police ordinances (a type of early modern administrative law) in Central Europe leading to a hierarchical categorisation of (multiple) topics that the texts could contain. The Policeymaterien (‘Matters’) were originally developed in the 1990s and can interlink the ordinances based on their topic. In other words, it is possible to search based on the topic throughout the entire database.

The data is contained in a turtle (.ttl) file. The reuse potential includes its use by research projects and databases concerned with other territories that have previously not been included but fall within the same language areas, as well as an application on verdicts rather than on the ‘laws’ themselves, in the understanding of the full scope of the early modern legal system. This dataset is available through Zenodo and GitHub.