Christiaan Huygens' ‘Verisimilia de planetis’ and its Relevance for Interpreting the ‘Cosmotheoros’. With its First English Translation

The article focuses on Verisimilia de planetis (1690), which is considered one of the main preparatory drafts of the posthumous Cosmotheoros (1698). The analysis of the most relevant examples of Huygens’ intellectual vocabulary intends to show not only Huygens’ reuse and hybridization of concepts and terms belonging to his wider scientific production, thus highlighting their diachronic and coherent evo- lution in a multilingual perspective, but also his implicit philosophical structures due to mutual exchanges with the philosophical thought of some of his contemporaries. As a result, this terminological analysis is the backbone underpinning the first English translation of Verisimilia de planetis

Christiaan Huygens’s Natural Theology in His Cosmotheoros and Other Late Writings

Christiaan Huygens’ late writings, ranging from 1686 to 1695, bear witness to his philosophical and theological reflections. In his Cosmotheoros, which was intended for publication, and other late writings which can be regarded as its preparatory drafts, Huygens deals with issues central to seventeenth-century philosophical debates: God’s power, divine and human intelligence, probabilistic epistemology, natural theology, and the plurality of worlds. This paper explains how Huygens’ reflections on animals and their souls, rational or not, play a key role in his epistemological reflections on natural theology. The issue of animal generation, as well as of animal souls, is crucial to identifying elements of continuity between the scientific topics of Huygens’ works, and may be considered as the point of intersection between his understanding of mechanism and of the teleology of nature. This neglected perspective on Huygens’ philosophical-natural animism reveals key elements of his model of rationality and of his attitude towards religion, demonstrating his involvement in the debate over animism, in which he seems to have been strongly influenced by English Protestant empiricism

A Proposal for a Two-Way Journey on Validating Locations in Unstructured and Structured Data

The Web of Data has grown explosively over the past few years, and as with any dataset, there are bound to be invalid statements in the data, as well as gaps. Natural Language Processing (NLP) is gaining interest to fill gaps in data by transforming (unstructured) text into structured data. However, there is currently a fundamental mismatch in approaches between Linked Data and NLP as the latter is often based on statistical methods, and the former on explicitly modelling knowledge. However, these fields can strengthen each other by joining forces. In this position paper, we argue that using linked data to validate the output of an NLP system, and using textual data to validate Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud statements is a promising research avenue. We illustrate our proposal with a proof of concept on a corpus of historical travel stories

VISCOUNTH: A Large-Scale Multilingual Visual Question Answering Dataset for Cultural Heritage

Visual question answering has recently been settled as a fundamental multi-modal reasoning task of artificial intelligence that allows users to get information about visual content by asking questions in natural language. In the cultural heritage domain this task can contribute to assist visitors in museums and cultural sites, thus increasing engagement. However, the development of visual question answering models for cultural heritage is prevented by the lack of suitable large-scale datasets. To meet this demand, we built a large-scale heterogeneous and multilingual (Italian and English) dataset for cultural heritage that comprises approximately 500K Italian cultural assets and 6.5M question-answer pairs. We propose a novel formulation of the task that requires reasoning over both the visual content and an associated natural language description, and present baselines for this task. Results show that the current state of the art is reasonably effective, but still far from satisfactory, therefore further research is this area is recommended. Nonetheless, we also present a holistic baseline to address visual and contextual questions and foster future research on the topic

Language as Scientific Instrument: a Preliminary Digital Analysis of Christiaan Huygens' Last Writings and Correspondence

This essay focuses on a digital text analysis with AntConc computational linguistics tool in order to find, list and compare the most important key word occurrences and their collocations in some of Christiaan Huygens last writings, from 1686 to 1695 and posthumous. The greatest attention is payed to three key words – Animus, Potentia and Lex – related to the themes of God’s power, divine and human intelligence, probabilistic epistemology, natural theology and plurality of worlds. In addition, these key words are used to select the letters written by Huygens to the most important of his contemporaries on the same topics. This challenge firstly involves demonstrating that his last writings on philosophical and theological reflections on mechanistic philosophy are not an anomaly within Huygens’ wider work, and secondly showing that these are indications of Huygens’ involvement in a number of theoretical debates in the second half of the seventeenth century

ArCo Knowledge Graph

The ArCo knowledge graph contains the ontology network and the data about the cultural properties catalogued by the Italian Institute of the General Catalogue and Documentation. Data are represented with RDF and by using N-Triples as syntax. The ontologies of the network are modelled with OWL 2 and serialised with the RDF/XML syntax. The ontology network is released along with alignments to other ontologies/vocabularies in the Semantic Web. Those alignments are provided within separate OWL files. The data are contained into a single RDF dump serialised as N-TRIPLES. Additionally, the release provides the links between ArCO entities and other entities published in other datasets in the Linked Open Data cloud. Such links are represented by using owl:sameAs axioms and serialised as N-TRIPLES into a separate file

ArCo: the Italian Cultural Heritage Knowledge Graph

ArCo is the Italian Cultural Heritage knowledge graph, consisting of a network of seven vocabularies and 169 million triples about 820 thousand cultural entities. It is distributed jointly with a SPARQL endpoint, a software for converting catalogue records to RDF, and a rich suite of documentation material (testing, evaluation, how-to, examples, etc.). ArCo is based on the official General Catalogue of the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities (MiBAC) - and its associated encoding regulations - which collects and validates the catalogue records of (ideally) all Italian Cultural Heritage properties (excluding libraries and archives), contributed by CH administrators from all over Italy. We present its structure, design methods and tools, its growing community, and delineate its importance, quality, and impact

Ontology Network and LOD on Italian Cultural Heritage

ArCo (Architecture of Knowledge) is a collaborative project that involves the institute of the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage ICCD (Institute of Catalogue and Documentation) and the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies of CNR (Italian National Research Council). ArCo aims at modelling the wide domain of Italian cultural heritage for two main purposes: (i) building a network of ontologies, compatible and aligned whenever possible with existing ontologies, that can be used as a de facto standard for representing cultural heritage data; (ii) publishing ICCD data as LOD: about 800.000 publishable files stored in the ICCD General Catalogue database. In this paper, we present ArCo structure, design methods and tools, its growing community, and we delineate its importance, quality, and impact in using semantic technologies in the fruition of Cultural Heritage

ArCo: the Italian Cultural Heritage Knowledge Graph

ArCo is the Italian Cultural Heritage knowledge graph, consisting of a network of seven vocabularies and 169 million triples about 820 thousand cultural entities. It is distributed jointly with a SPARQL endpoint, a software for converting catalogue records to RDF, and a rich suite of documentation material (testing, evaluation, how-to, examples, etc.). ArCo is based on the official General Catalogue of the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities (MiBAC) - and its associated encoding regulations - which collects and validates the catalogue records of (ideally) all Italian Cultural Heritage properties (excluding libraries and archives), contributed by CH administrators from all over Italy. We present its structure, design methods and tools, its growing community, and delineate its importance, quality, and impact