Linked Open Data native cataloguing and archival description

In the last years cultural heritage institutions have radically changed the way they publish their data. Publishing Linked Open Data (LOD) offers many advantages, in terms of innovation, visibility, and engagement with patrons. New data are served along with legacy services and data, via dedicated interfaces that allow developers and Digital Humanists to access specialised information. However, Linked data are living entities that change over time and require expensive curatorial activities, and should not be misaligned with respect to original data. To cope with this problem, several LOD-native cataloguing systems have been created. In this article an overview of current projects for LOD-native cataloguing is provided. Projects and systems are analysed with respect to related problems and benefits

Archivi Fotografici per la Storia dell’Arte e Semantic Web. Problemi, Risorse e Linee di Ricerca

In this paper are presented problems, resources, and research lines related to the application Semantic Web technologies in art historical photo archives. In detail, (1) benefits of the usage Linked Open Data for art historians are illustrated, (2) a research line shared between cataloguers and art historians is proposed, namely the definition and retrieval of authoritative artwork attributions in art historical photo archives, (3) a methodology for formalising such a problem is described, and (4) limits and future work related to the valorisation of photo archives catalogues are discussed

Mining Authoritativeness in Art Historical Photo Archives. Semantic Web Applications for Connoisseurship

The purpose of this work is threefold: (i) to facilitate knowledge discovery in art historical photo archives, (ii) to support users' decision-making process when evaluating contradictory artwork attributions, and (iii) to provide policies for information quality improvement in art historical photo archives. The approach is to leverage Semantic Web technologies in order to aggregate, assess, and recommend the most documented authorship attributions. In particular, findings of this work offer art historians an aid for retrieving relevant sources, assessing textual authoritativeness (i.e. internal grounds) of sources of attribution, and evaluating cognitive authoritativeness of cited scholars. At the same time, the retrieval process allows art historical data providers to define a low-cost data integration process to update and enrich their collection data. The contributions of this thesis are the following: (1) a methodology for representing questionable information by means of ontologies; (2) a conceptual framework of Information Quality measures addressing dimensions of textual and cognitive authoritativeness characterising art historical data, (3) a number of policies for metadata quality improvement in art historical photo archives as derived from the application of the framework, (4) a ranking model leveraging the conceptual framework, (5) a semantic crawler, called mAuth, that harvests authorship attributions in the Web of Data, and (6) an API and a Web Application to serve information to applications and final users for consuming data. Despite findings are limited to a restricted number of photo archives and datasets, the research impacts on a broader number of stakeholders, such as archives, museums, and libraries, which can reuse the conceptual framework for assessing questionable information, mutatis mutandi, to other near fields in the Humanities

Knowledge Representation of digital Hermeneutics of archival and literary Sources

Scholarly analysis of archival, library, and literary sources results in a variety of digital artefacts meant to foster knowledge discovery and new research enquiries. Guidelines and standards to formally represent disciplinary information are available (e.g. XML schemas, ontologies, vocabularies). However, digital artefacts rarely address reusable structured information on the hermeneutical approach adopted by scholars when validating hypotheses. As a consequence, reproducibility and assessment of research results is hampered, and comparing online contradictory information is still a hard task. In this work we show how to leverage Semantic Web technologies in a high-level, portable data model for representing hermeneutical aspects related to cross-disciplinary analysis of archival and literary sources. We showcase three representative scenarios in the Cultural Heritage domain where the model is applied, and we describe benefits and limits of our solution

From ontology design to user-centred interfaces for music heritage

In this article we investigate the bridge between ontology design and UI/UX design methodologies to assist designers in prototyping web applications for information seeking purposes. We briefly review the state of the art in ontology design and UI/UX methodologies, then we illustrate our approach applied to a case study in the music heritage domain.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, part of "XII Convegno Annuale AIUCD 2023 Proceedings

Modellare ontologicamente il dominio archivistico in una prospettiva di integrazione disciplinare

In this paper the authors reflect on some topics related to the semantic modeling of cultural heritage description. In particular we move from some ontologies as developed in - and for - the archival domain. The purpose of this approach is double: to understand, from the one hand, the role of the archival conceptual metodology for the cultural heritage enhancement; from the other, to propose a model to let heterogeneous disciplines able to dialogue in a shared semantic perspective. The authors adopt a triple level vision: 1. the importance of the documentary unit as a primary full text source, 2. the possibility to integrate models from potentially different research environments and domain, 3. the relevance of agent's roles and functions as an exploratory approach to the meaning of documents. In particular we reflect on the concept of "creator" - the agent - as a key to manage multiple relationships (between people and between people and resources) in a provenance-oriented perspective. The authors finally discuss about an ontology that formally describes our vision: PRoles (Political Roles Ontology)

Expressing Without Asserting in the Arts

Critical debate as well as uncertain or subjective claims are pivotal elements in arts scholarly analysis. Asserting such statements in RDF is hindered by the correct representation of uncertain or evolving aspects. In this article we examine and discuss the need and usefulness of expressing without asserting (EWA) arbitrary claims as RDF named graphs. We examine effectiveness of prior approaches to EWA and we propose a solution, called conjectures, to express and retrieve statements whose truth value is not specified

Using ontologies as a faceted browsing for heterogeneous cultural heritage collections

In this paper we present a project regarding the possible use of multi- ple and interconnected OWL ontologies (GO!, HiCo, and Proles) in order to explore the semantic content of heterogeneous digital collections (a digital li- brary, a full-text scholarly edition, and a relational database) in the cultural her- itage domain (Geolat, Vespasiano da Bisticci Letters, and Zeri photo archive). The aim is to discover knowledge by revealing, through facets, possible latent connections \u2013 or even contradictory statements \u2013 between data, moving from person, places and dates in an event-centric dimension determined by a context- oriented perspective

Characterizing the Landscape of Musical Data on the Web: State of the Art and Challenges

Musical data can be analysed, combined, transformed and exploited for diverse purposes. However, despite the proliferation of digital libraries and repositories for music, infrastructures and tools, such uses of musical data remain scarce. As an initial step to help fill this gap, we present a survey of the landscape of musical data on the Web, available as a Linked Open Dataset: the musoW dataset of catalogued musical resources. We present the dataset and the methodology and criteria for its creation and assessment. We map the identified dimensions and parameters to existing Linked Data vocabularies, present insights gained from SPARQL queries, and identify significant relations between resource features. We present a thematic analysis of the original research questions associated with surveyed resources and identify the extent to which the collected resources are Linked Data-ready

Convergenze semantiche tra musei, archivi e biblioteche. Ontologie per le relazioni interpersonali

This paper presents the state of the art of the cataloguing description of personal relationships between creators of archival records and people that are related to the life cycle of cultural objects, as highlighted by museums, archives and libraries records (i.e. GLAM, translated in italian MAB). Since people are fundamental access points to the cultural heritage, the representation of relationships between people and corporate bodies in Linked Open Data is of increasing interest. Nonetheless, a shared and comprehensive vocabulary of personal relationships is not available yet. Leveraging on Semantic Web technologies, and ontologies in particular, the aim is to identify existing ontologies that allow to represent relationships in their context (i.e. time, space and events); to map and classify different types of personal relationships; and to provide a formal representation of relationships not available in existing ontologies. As a result, we present an ontology, with a controlled vocabulary, for the representation of the scenario of personal relationships in the cultural heritage domain