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

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

Knowledge Graphs Evolution and Preservation -- A Technical Report from ISWS 2019

One of the grand challenges discussed during the Dagstuhl Seminar "Knowledge Graphs: New Directions for Knowledge Representation on the Semantic Web" and described in its report is that of a: "Public FAIR Knowledge Graph of Everything: We increasingly see the creation of knowledge graphs that capture information about the entirety of a class of entities. [...] This grand challenge extends this further by asking if we can create a knowledge graph of "everything" ranging from common sense concepts to location based entities. This knowledge graph should be "open to the public" in a FAIR manner democratizing this mass amount of knowledge." Although linked open data (LOD) is one knowledge graph, it is the closest realisation (and probably the only one) to a public FAIR Knowledge Graph (KG) of everything. Surely, LOD provides a unique testbed for experimenting and evaluating research hypotheses on open and FAIR KG. One of the most neglected FAIR issues about KGs is their ongoing evolution and long term preservation. We want to investigate this problem, that is to understand what preserving and supporting the evolution of KGs means and how these problems can be addressed. Clearly, the problem can be approached from different perspectives and may require the development of different approaches, including new theories, ontologies, metrics, strategies, procedures, etc. This document reports a collaborative effort performed by 9 teams of students, each guided by a senior researcher as their mentor, attending the International Semantic Web Research School (ISWS 2019). Each team provides a different perspective to the problem of knowledge graph evolution substantiated by a set of research questions as the main subject of their investigation. In addition, they provide their working definition for KG preservation and evolution

<b>Representing </b><b>Uncertainty </b><b>and </b><b>Competing Claims</b><b> in Cultural Heritage </b><b>Knowledge Graphs</b>

This presentation is the representation of Humanities critical discourse in KGs. In particular, it presents existing KGs representing this phenomenon, provides a brief analysis on the phenomenon in Cultural Heritage data in Wikidata and provides a case study on the formalisation of the process of authenticity assessment of documents. </p

<b>DH Project Management (part I) - DHDK Crash Courses 2023</b>

This presentation is part of the Crash Courses series for the Master's program in Digital Humanities and Digital Knowledge (Department of Classical Philology and Italian Studies, University of Bologna). It provides a concise overview of the key stages involved in a Digital Humanities (DH) project, following the scientific method. These stages encompass everything from gathering data to the creation of a scholarly research paper.</p

Conjectures: Using RDF in critical discourse in the humanities

This presentation is aboutn the need and usefulness of expressing without asserting (EWA) arbitrary claims as RDF named graphs. We narrow the problem of EWA in humanities discourse, we survey the state of the art, finally we propose our solution, Conjectures, to express and retrieve statements whose truth value is not specified and we apply it to a use case scenario. The work has been presented at Workshop on Computational Methods in the Humanities 2022 (COMHUM 2022).</p

Enhancing cultural heritage collections through linked open data: the production of the mythLOD dataset

La rappresentazione formale dei metadati culturali è sempre stata una sfida, considerando tanto l’eterogeneità degli oggetti culturali quanto l’esigenza di documentare l’atto interpretativo esercitato dagli esperti. Questo articolo presenta una panoramica della ri valorizzazione della collezione digitale Mythologiae in formato linked open data. La ricerca mira a esplorare i dati di una raccolta di opere d’arte (Mythologiae) promuovendo le potenzialità del web semantico, concentrandosi in particolare sulla rappresentazione formale dell’associazione degli oggetti culturali alle fonti letterarie, così come realizzata dagli esperti, documentando anche le loro interpretazioni.Il flusso di lavoro è consistito nella definizione del modello di dati, nella pulizia e disambiguazione degli stessi, nella conversione (da struttura tabulare a grafo) e nell’attività di testing (in particolare la revisione degli esperti di dominio del dataset tramite competency question e visualizzazioni dei dati).Il risultato è la piattaforma mythLOD, che presenta il dataset insieme alla documentazione dettagliata della ricerca. Inoltre, la piattaforma ospita i due spazi di visualizzazione dei dati (il catalogo online e un esperimento di data storytelling sul caso studio dell’Eneide) che arricchiscono la documentazione del progetto come unità di test user-friendly per il dataset e costituiscono un ulteriore strumento di documentazione del progetto e di esplorazione della collezione.The formal representation of cultural metadata has always been a challenge, considering the heterogeneity of cultural objects and especially when dealing with experts’ interpretation over them.This paper presents an overview of the mythLOD dataset production as the Mythologiae digital collection revalorisation into linked open data format. The research aims then to explore Mythologiae data leveraging semantic web potentialities, focusing over the formal representation of experts’ analysis when associating visual artworks (and their interpretations) to literary sources.The workflow of the project consisted of data model definition, data cleaning and entity linking, conversion (from tabular data to graph) and testing activity (domain experts review over competency questions and two designed on-purpose data visualizations). The result is the mythLOD platform, which present the dataset and the detailed documentation of the research. Additionally, the platform hosts the two data visualization spaces which have been implemented – the online catalogue and the storytelling experiment over Aeneid – as a user friendly testing unit for the dataset and an additional tool for documenting the project and exploring the collection

VaSto: un\u2019edizione digitale interdisciplinare

The paper focuses on a case of interdisciplinary digital edition, developed in collaborative mode, whose ecdotic and interpretative innovations are analyzed. The edition \u2013 produced as part of the VaSto project \u2013 is dedicated to Benedetto Varchi\u2019s Storia fiorentina, which traces the events that took place in Florence between 1527 and 1538, commissioned by the Duke of Florence Cosimo I de\u2019 Medici in 1546, left unfinished and published only in 1721 in a version censored by Cosimo\u2019s circle. Due to the wealth of data on Florentine life at the time, it is considered a valuable source for scholars, historians and art historians, but the original version is still unpublished

Gastric conduit perforation after Ivor Lewis esophagectomy successfully treated with endoscopic vacuum therapy (E-VAC): a case report

Gastric conduit perforation is a life-threatening complication after esophagectomy and currently there is no consensus about its optimal management. Endoscopic vacuum therapy (E-VAC) is a promising technique for the treatment of leaks and perforations after upper gastro-intestinal surgery. We report the case of a 65years-old male patient who underwent an Ivor Lewis esophagectomy for esophago-gastric junction adenocarcinoma. He referred to our Emergency Department for septic shock and right hydropneumothorax. We performed an emergency thoracoscopy with intraoperative esophagogastroduodenoscopy which showed a pre-pyloric perforation of the gastric conduit. The perforation was initially treated with unsuccessful primary surgical closure and subsequently by means of E-VAC, firstly placed intraluminal and then intracavitary. With the latter technique, we assisted to a progressive clinical improvement until the definitive healing of the perforation. To our knowledge, this is the first case of a gastric tube perforation after esophagectomy successfully treated with E-VAC