Populating the Digital Space for Cultural Heritage with Heritage Digital Twins

The present paper concerns the design of the semantic infrastructure of the digital space for cultural heritage as envisaged by the European Commission in its recent documents. Due to the complexity of the cultural heritage data and of their intrinsic interrelationships, it is necessary to introduce a novel ontology, yet compliant with existing standards and interoperable with previous platforms used in this context, such as Europeana. The digital space organization must be tailored to the methods and the theory of cultural heritage, briefly summarized in the introduction. The new ontology is based on the Digital Twin concept, i.e. the digital counterpart of cultural heritage assets incorporating all the digital information pertaining to them. This creates a Knowledge Base on the cultural heritage digital space. The paper outlines the main features of the proposed Heritage Digital Twin ontology and provides some examples of application. Future work will include completing the ontology in all its details and testing it in other real cases and with the various sectors of the cultural heritage community.Comment: Submitted to Data - An Open Access Journal from MDPI. 29 pages, 9 figure

metadata and tools for integration and preservation of cultural heritage 3d information

In this paper we investigate many of the various storage, portability and interoperability issues arising among archaeologists and cultural heritage people when dealing with 3D technologies. On the one side, the available digital repositories look often unable to guarantee affordable features in the management of 3D models and their metadata; on the other side the nature of most of the available data format for 3D encoding seem to be not satisfactory for the necessary portability required nowadays by 3D information across different systems. We propose a set of possible solutions to show how integration can be achieved through the use of well known and wide accepted standards for data encoding and data storage. Using a set of 3D models acquired during various archaeological campaigns and a number of open source tools, we have implemented a straightforward encoding process to generate meaningful semantic data and metadata. We will also present the interoperability process carried out to integrate the encoded 3D models and the geographic features produced by the archaeologists. Finally we will report the preliminary (rather encouraging) development of a semantic enabled and persistent digital repository, where 3D models (but also any kind of digital data and metadata) can easily be stored, retrieved and shared with the content of other digital archives

The Heritage Digital Twin: a bicycle made for two. The integration of digital methodologies into cultural heritage research

The paper concerns the definition of a novel ontology for cultural heritage based on the concept of digital twin. The ontology, called Heritage Digital Twin ontology, is a compatible extension of the well-known CIDOC CRM ISO standard for cultural heritage documentation and incorporates all the different documentation systems presently in use for cultural heritage documentation. In the authors' view, it supports documentation interoperability at a higher level than the ones currently in use and enables effective cooperation among different users.Comment: Submitted to Open Research Europe. 30 pages, 9 figure

A Cloud-Native Web Application for Assisted Metadata Generation and Retrieval: THESPIAN-NER

Within the context of the Competence Centre for the Conservation of Cultural Heritage (4CH) project, the design and deployment of a platform-as-a-service cloud infrastructure for the first European competence centre of cultural heritage (CH) has begun, and some web services have been integrated into the platform. The first integrated service is the INFN-CHNet web application for FAIR storage of scientific analysis on CH: THESPIAN-Mask. It is based on CIDOC-CRM-compatible ontology and CRMhs, describing the scientific metadata. To ease the process of metadata generation and data injection, another web service has been developed: THESPIAN-NER. It is a tool based on a deep neural network for named entity recognition (NER), enabling users to upload their Italian-written report files and obtain labelled entities. Those entities are used as keywords either to serve as (semi)automatically custom queries for the database, or to fill (part of) the metadata form as a descriptor for the file to be uploaded. The services have been made freely available in the 4CH PaaS cloud platform

ARIADNEplus Data Aggregation Pipeline:User Guide (2.4)

The purpose of this User Guide is to provide a short introduction to the ARIADNEplus data aggregation pipeline. It defines, for the archaeological data providers, the process by which their data should be uploaded to the ARIADNE Content Cloud, so that it appears in the ARIADNEplus Catalogue, and can be searched via the ARIADNEplus Portal

Enabling European archaeological research: The ARIADNE E-infrastructure

Research e-infrastructures, digital archives and data services have become important pillars of scientific enterprise that in recent decades has become ever more collaborative, distributed and data-intensive. The archaeological research community has been an early adopter of digital tools for data acquisition, organisation, analysis and presentation of research results of individual projects. However, the provision of einfrastructure and services for data sharing, discovery, access and re-use has lagged behind. This situation is being addressed by ARIADNE: the Advanced Research Infrastructure for Archaeological Dataset Networking in Europe. This EUfunded network has developed an einfrastructure that enables data providers to register and provide access to their resources (datasets, collections) through the ARIADNE data portal, facilitating discovery, access and other services across the integrated resources. This article describes the current landscape of data repositories and services for archaeologists in Europe, and the issues that make interoperability between them difficult to realise. The results of the ARIADNE surveys on users' expectations and requirements are also presented. The main section of the article describes the architecture of the einfrastructure, core services (data registration, discovery and access) and various other extant or experimental services. The ongoing evaluation of the data integration and services is also discussed. Finally, the article summarises lessons learned, and outlines the prospects for the wider engagement of the archaeological research community in sharing data through ARIADNE

Digital Collections of Semantically Annotated Cultural Heritage Texts

Free text is a class of information that comprises a wide range of cultural heritage documents,usually very difficult to process with traditional forms and relational databases. To this classbelong various types of documents, (e.g. texts from ancient sources, comments or technical notesproduced by cultural heritage experts, excavation diaries written during archaeological excavationactivity) showing different schemas and multiple ways of content organisation and presentation.The creation of coherent archives to store the content of these documents in a meaningful wayimplies a totally different point of view, where the main focus is on the text and its meaning,rather than on the structure of its container (e.g. the tables of a database or the fields of a form).This document-centric approach provides a way of preserving the integrity of the originaldocuments without sacrificing efficient information retrieval

La modellazione semantica delle entità testuali: Il modello CRMtex e la descrizione ontologica dei testi antichi

This paper presents CRMtex, an ontological model based on CIDOC CRM developed since 2015 to support the study of ancient documents. The model is intended to identify relevant textual entities and to model the scientific process related to the investigation of ancient texts and their features in order to foster integration with other Cultural Heritage research fields. CRMtex is able to identify and define in a clear and unambiguous way the main entities involved in the study and edition of ancient handwritten texts and to describe them by means of appropriate ontological instruments in a multidisciplinary perspective. The CRMtex model also provides tools for managing this kind of complexity by defining classes and properties for describing a handwritten text in all its aspects, from its creation (and/or destruction) in the past, down to its present conservation, investigation and study by scholars, including its transcription, translation, interpretation and publication. The full compatibility of CRMtex with the CIDOC CRM ontology and its extensions ensures persistent interoperability of data encoded by means of its entities with other semantic information produced in cultural heritage and Digital Humanities.Questo articolo presenta CRMtex, un modello ontologico basato su CIDOC CRM sviluppato dal 2015 per supportare lo studio di documenti antichi. Il modello ha lo scopo di identificare entità testuali rilevanti e modellare il processo scientifico relativo allo studio dei testi antichi e delle loro caratteristiche al fine di favorire l'integrazione con altri campi di ricerca relativi al patrimonio culturale. CRMtex è in grado di identificare e definire in modo chiaro e univoco le principali entità coinvolte nello studio e nell'edizione di testi manoscritti e di descriverle mediante opportuni strumenti ontologici in una prospettiva multidisciplinare. Il modello CRMtex fornisce inoltre strumenti per gestire questo tipo di complessità definendo classi e proprietà per descrivere un testo manoscritto in tutti i suoi aspetti, dalla sua creazione (e/o distruzione) nel passato, fino alla sua attuale conservazione, indagine e studio da parte degli studiosi, compresa la sua trascrizione, traduzione, interpretazione e pubblicazione. La piena compatibilità di CRMtex con l'ontologia CIDOC CRM e le sue estensioni garantisce l'interoperabilità persistente dei dati codificati per mezzo delle sue entità con altre informazioni semantiche prodotte nell’ambito dei Beni Culturali e delle Digital Humanities