Atlas of Paths: a Formal Ontology of Historical Pathways in Italy

Information, 2020

Building upon the concepts of constructed past theory, this paper introduces the outcome of ontology-mediated data modeling developed by the authors within the last 15 years. Assuming that the past is something constructed through reflection of former times, one of our major concerns is guaranteeing the traceability of the construction process of an integrated historical discourse built from all available sources of information, regardless of their origin or nature. Therefore, by means of defining key concepts such as ‘unit of topography’ and ‘actor’, we created an information system for data gathering and exploitation and applied it to some experiences of construction of the past. When applied within the archaeological domain, the result is an archaeological information system interoperable with other sources of historical information. Its strength is that it ensures the traceability of the process from the beginning avoiding the introduction and repetition of errors within the sys...

VII Ciclo di studi medievali, Atti del Convegno, 2021

Economic History in the Late Middle Age is mostly built upon the information contained in accounting books, which are one of the most important sources to explore economic mechanisms used by the earliest merchant societies operating in the late medieval Mediterranean area. Archival information from solicitors, recording their letters of exchange, transactions, but also trials, marriages and partnership relations also provide valuable data. The study of this topic is rather complex mainly because of the massive amount of topographic and alphanumeric information contained within the sources. The repetition of information series registering the economic transactions, balances and accounting records informs about the products merchants were trading with, the economic mechanisms of exchange, and the multiple actors taking part in these activities. Our research team develops an ongoing project focused on the study of Joan de Torralba's society files and their Mediterranean connections, which led us into the design of an integrated data-management ontology-based digital system in order to process and exploit large amounts of spatiotemporal data in the most efficient way. Our contribution aims at introducing this records management system for economic history of merchant societies. Its theoretical underpinning principles allow for data interoperability and transferability to multiple information systems built upon normalized data. We will exemplify the procedure of data introduction and exploitation with information available at the Archivio di Stato di Firenze in order to explore the connections between the Barcelonese merchant Joan de Torralba and his Italian partners through the records kept at the notarial books, focusing on the solicitor Giuliano Scarsi in particular. We will also discuss the potential of such approaches for building a wider historical discourse within a networking framework in which all sources of information for past construction are considered, regardless their origin, nature or support.

2019

The rich cultural heritage preserved in the Belliniano Civic Museum of Catania has been studied and promoted in the last years mainly thanks to the BellinInRete project. It includes collections of objects (or resources) of a very different nature: paintings, photos, pianos, autograph scores, manuscript leaves, books preserved in the Museum’s library, etc. In order to make the Belliniano Museum’s heritage interoperable and reusable by scholars and cultural operators, we propose to semantically organize it in a unique homogeneous container, the OntoBellini ontology, designed and developed according to the Linked Open Data and Semantic Web paradigms. The wide variety of the involved museum resources, not even fully digitalised and catalogued, led us to the idea of experimenting with the RDA (Resource Description and Access) standard for creating library and cultural heritage resource metadata. In this paper we describe the ongoing work towards the realization of the OntoBellini ontology.

I. Draelants, C.Faron Zucker, A. Monnin, A. Zucker (eds.), Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Semantic Web for Scientific Heritage (SW4SH 2016), pp. 7-18 [http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1595/]

Geolat -Geography for Latin Literature is a research project, aimed at making accessible a digital library containing the works of Latin literature (from its origins to the end of the Roman Empire) where the geographic knowledge expressed in the Latin texts themselves can be reused. To do so the core of Geolat is the GO! ontology developed ad hoc to describe the geographical knowledge contained in the texts of the library. The semantic annotation of geographical knowledge allows to highlight that the the perception of the space that ancient populations had in their minds is a type of cultural heritage; and thanks to the annotation this type of knowledge can produce new types of cultural objects (interactive maps, editions of texts, etc.). The project is under development at Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici of Università del Piemonte Orientale, and financially supported by Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo.

Web Reasoning and Rule Systems, 2015

Proceedings of VAST, 2006

The need to investigate an archaeological context causes the inevitable destruction of the upper strata in favour of the lower ones. On-site research activity therefore translates into a documentation activity (forms/photographs/surveys), which must be as neutral as possible and not necessarily biased by the scientific interests of the archaeologist. This documentation activity has recently been subjected to an indepth analysis and evaluation. A wide spectrum of standards and reference regulations is being defined by different national and international Organisations. The various attempts made at normalizing the production of documents of excavations have lead to the elaboration of a large number of forms. The introduction of computer science in the management of archaeological records has actually complicated the picture because it has added different formats, software and operating systems, chosen by each individual researcher. Considering how dangerous it is to convert older data to newer digital formats, as is any translation from one language to another, we started a project aiming at defining an ontology able to guarantee interoperability between different archives without modifying, altering or sacrificing the archives created by each archaeologist. The primary objective of our research has been to analyse the Italian documentation produced during the stratigraphical excavation, which represents the most consistent corpus of data available also in digital format. We chose the CIDOC-CRM because it is event-oriented. In terms of content, the archaeological documentation activity may be easily schematized: it documents a past event occurring during an archaeological era and, at the same time, it documents the action of the modern-day scholar. Any excavation activity and its pertinent methodology may be easily described following this conceptual formalism.

The Semantic Web is an extension of the current internet. It will put a semantic layer to it and it will provide advanced services to users. In addition, the Semantic Web is about sharing data so that they are used and reused and thus result easily traceable. The Cultural sector and museums in particular, recognize that their knowledge should be shared in a way meaningful to people. The goal of both Museums and Semantic Web is to serve users, to discover what is meaningful to them and share it. As a result, during the last decade the cultural sector has seen a growing number of portals and projects that adopt semantic web technologies.

In the last decade several projects have been developed for the digitization and semantization of cultural heritage data. They were developed to preserve and maintain this heritage, but bringing it closer to all types of users and allowing access to this information to other sectors such as tourism, education, etc. In these developments, web technologies are combined, along with the use of knowledge graphs and interactive visualisation tools. Although remarkably interesting projects have been developed, in those projects, the data visualization tools are usually focused on the project context. This makes it difficult to reuse these jobs. Additionally, there are peculiarities of cultural heritage data considered with little depth, such as uncertainty, spatial and temporal granularity, as well as other aspects, such as relationships between data. In this article, these problems are described and based on other works such as VUMO or VISO, the design of an ontology that formalizes how t...

2013

The purpose of the ITACH@ project for Innovative Technologies And Cultural Heritage Aggregation is to provide innovative tools that will increase the value of the Italian cultural and tourist industries. The system proposed by the project, and currently in development, may be applied to the entirety of the information produced by cultural bodies and institutions such as libraries, archives, museums and tourist organisations and is also intended for use by similar, adjacent or related fields. The project aims to resolve difficulties in a context suffering from:

Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing

The exponential growth of data has made ontology modeling an up-and-coming research area for knowledge representation. One of the domains of interest is represented by Cultural Heritage, in which modeling of environments, such as archaeological parks, could lead to their protection and enhancement. In this scenario, the valuable dataset on the Naples Urban Archaeological Park (PAUN) is of particular interest. Due to its peculiarity, the database could benefit from innovative techniques for retrieving the information, representing a large part of the information contained within the DatabencArt platform, which collects data on Campania's cultural heritage. This paper aims to introduce an ontology-based approach to improve data retrieval, which could help expert users in the field (archaeologists, art historians, geologists, etc.). Scholars need to be able to easily compare the information. To this end, a semantic search is able to transform a vast amount of data into linked conce...