An EpiDoc ontological perspective: the epigraphs of the Castello Ursino Civic Museum of Catania via CIDOC CRM

The rich epigraphic heritage of the Castello Ursino Civic Museum of Catania has been studied by the EpiCUM project that encoded it in EpiDoc TEI XML, an XML based standard digital representation for cultural heritage contents. The project made the epigraphic heritage available in a digital museum: under the guise of the ‘Voci di Pietra’ exhibition, a selection of epigraphs were presented, implementing innovative presentation modalities thanks to a smart use of technological and digital means. Information contained in the epigraphs was semantically reorganized in a unique homogeneous container, the EpiONT ontology, constructed according to the Linked Open Data paradigm and to consolidated international standards. The encoding of the ancient texts, by the TEI standard and its EpiDoc subset, is wedded to the paradigmatic semantic web model for museums and cultural heritage. The EpiONT ontology is currently populated by 580 epigraphs collected in the Castello Ursino Civic Museum. Designed according to the CIDOC CRM standard, it makes use of the SKOS vocabularies of the EAGLE project concerning material, execution technique, type of inscription, and type of support of an epigraph. The EpiONT ontology additionally can handle any uncertainty in the origin and place of discovery of the epigraphs

On the elimination of quantifiers through descriptors in predicate logic

We present a variant of the Davis–Fechter’s technique for eliminating quantifiers in first-order logic, aimed at reducing the incidence of irrelevant dependencies in the construction of Skolem terms. The basic idea behind this contribution is to treat as a single syntactic unit every maximal ‘quantifier batch’, i.e., group of contiguous alike quantifiers, whose internal order (which has no significance) is thereby prevented from entangling the final result. Through concrete cross-translations, our version of the free-variable predicate calculus turns out to be equipollent—in means of expression and of proof—to the one originally proposed by Davis and Fechter and hence to a relatively conventional version of quantified first-order logic

EGITH - Engendering Data. Steps Towards an Ontology for the Representation of Gender in Cultural Heritage

The neologism en-gendering indicates the process of generation, production, and constitution of gender. From this point of view, gender is a semiotic device assumed by subjects in the formation of their own identity, adhering to the effects of meaning produced by the models and habitus of a given culture. Feminist scholars have long analysed the process in Art and Literature, but this knowledge is fragmented and not yet adequately supported by digital tools. In this paper we describe EGITH (En-gendering Identities Through History) an extension of GenderedCHContents, an ontology aligned with the Europeana Data Model (EDM), designed to capture concepts related to the construction of gender in the CH domain [2]. We further extend the ontology GenderedCHContents with fine-grained information, relative to the narrative and semiotic dimension of gender in CH. For the modelling of fictional characters we rely, on the one hand, on the semiotic of Charles Sanders Peirce and the Narrative Theory of Umberto Eco [3], while on the other, we rely on the tradition of feminist literary criticism. EGITH is populated with data concerning the main female characters in two well-known literary works of the Italian canon, Dante’s Divina Commedia and Boccaccio’s Decameron, and their literary critique

Gerarchie cumulative e computabilit\ue0 sopra universi d\u2019insiemi

Varie indagini metamatematiche, a partire dalla storica dimostrazione di Fraenkel del- l\u2019indipendenza dell\u2019assioma di scelta, necessitavano il ricorso alla definizione di universi gerarchici di insiemi. Ci`o ha portato alla scoperta di importanti strutture cumulative, tra cui quella indivi- duata da von Neumann (generalmente indicata come l\u2019universo di tutti gli insiemi) e l\u2019universo dei cosiddetti construibili di G \u308odel. Varianti di tali strutture tornano utili anche in studi riguardan- ti i fondamenti dell\u2019analisi (secondo l\u2019approccio di Abraham Robinson), o riguardanti gli insiemi non-ben-fondati. Mossi dunque dalla loro rilevanza e pervasivit`a nella matematica, offriamo qui una presentazione sistematica di queste molte strutture. Riporteremo come numerose propriet`a di nozioni inerenti le gerarchie di insiemi, quale ad esempio la nozione di rango, siano state controllate grazie all\u2019assistenza del verificatore di dimostrazioni \uc6tnaNova. Illustreremo poi, tramite procedure per la manipolazione efficace degli insiemi ereditariamente finiti di Ackermann, implementate in SETL e in Maple, un caso particolarmente significativo fra i tanti in cui le entita` costitutive di un universo di insiemi possono venire costruite e trattate algoritmicamente: per questa via, il fruttuoso impiego delle gerarchie cumulative di insiemi viene ad estendersi dalla matematica pura agli ambiti dell\u2019informatica teorica e dell\u2019algoritmic

Cumulative hierarchies and computability over universes of sets.

Various metamathematical investigations, beginning with Fraenkel\u2019s historical proof of the independence of the axiom of choice, called for suitable definitions of hierarchical universes of sets. This led to the discovery of such important cumulative structures as the one singled out by von Neumann (generally taken as the universe of all sets) and Goedel's universe of the so-called constructibles. Variants of those are exploited occasionally in studies concerning the foundations of analysis (according to Abraham Robinson\u2019s approach), or concerning non-well-founded sets. We hence offer a systematic presentation of these many structures, partly motivated by their relevance and pervasiveness in mathematics. As we report, numerous properties of hierarchy-related notions such as rank, have been verified with the assistance of the \uc6tnaNova proof-checker. Through SETL and Maple implementations of procedures which effectively handle the Ackermann\u2019s hereditarily finite sets, we illustrate a particularly significant case among those in which the entities which form a universe of sets can beSet theory, computable set theory, cumulative hierarchies, superstructures, heredi- tarily finite sets, constructible sets, hypersets, proof verification, syllogistics algorithmically constructed and manipulated; hereby, the fruitful bearing on pure mathematics of cumulative set hierarchies ramifies into the realms of theoretical computer science and algorithmics

Towards an ontology for investigating on archaeological Sicilian landscapes?

In this paper we present an ontology, called OntoCeramic 2.0, mod- elling new survey and legacy data concerning Sicilian ancient potteries collected in the archives of Heritage Superintendence of Syracuse and Catania, in the Regional Technical Oce of Sicily, and in the State Archives of Palermo and Catania. OntoCeramic 2.0, developed using the Web Ontology Language 2 (OWL 2) and constructed according to the standard CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM), is a first step towards the definition of an ontology for representing and reasoning on the artificial and natural processes that shaped the archaeological Sicilian landscapes, their conformation and topographic information, the distribution of ancient rural sites, and the dynamics of the agrarian organization in Sicily

An ontology for legacy data on ancient ceramics of the plain of Catania

Digital representation and organization of legacy data plays a crucial role in the di↵usion, use, and understanding of data stored in old publications, archives, and museums. An interesting case study comes from data of potteries discovered in ancient rural territories of Eastern Sicily, as the majority of legacy data for this research area exists in the form of old maps and paper catalogues: to make these datasets available at a global level, innovative digital technologies are needed. The Semantic Web o↵ers well established methodologies and tools to semantically model application domains and to integrate data, making them global entities available on the Web. In this contribution, we present OntoCeramic 2.0, an OWL 2 (Web On- tology Language 2) ontology storing archaeological data from the plain of Catania regarding ancient potteries, and whose taxonomy refines and extends OntoCeramic 1.0, an ontology for the classification of ancient ce- ramics defined in a previous work by some of the authors. OntoCeramic 2.0, constructed according to the standard CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM), represents and integrates new survey and legacy data on ancient pottery stored in the archives of Heritage Superintendence of Syracuse and Catania, in the Regional Technical Oce of Sicily, and in the State Archives of Palermo and Catania

Study on the absorption of flavours compounds from wine by polyethylene films.

Evaluation of the absorption of wine aromatic compounds on polyethylene film intended for food contact