RHONDA — Research in Historical Ordinances and Normative Data

RHONDA is a primarily online community — bi-monthly meetings, with in-person workshops at conferences such as Linked Pasts — concerned with the development of a controlled multilingual classification (an ontology) for early modern police ordinances. It connects researchers from projects across the Holy Roman Empire, the Low Countries, France, the Nordic countries, and Italy.

I co-chair RHONDA with Andreas Wagner (Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory). The classification work has produced two significant publications: the 2023 Building and Deploying a Classification Schema using Open Standards and Technology in the Journal for Digital Legal History (with Wagner and van Zundert), and the 2025 article on the 2020 systematic multilingual categorisation of Policeymaterien (with Wagner and Härter). RHONDA also contributes to the broader Linked Open Data infrastructure of the field, in collaboration with the Data4History consortium.