Ontologies and historical archives: A way to tell new stories

Magro

Baldo

2019

JWE

Self Cite

In this paper we show that an ontology-based approach can be beneficial for enhancing the access to cultural resources, and in particular historical documents. The paper starts with an overview of our approach, aimed at providing online archival systems with a semantic layer based on Semantic Web standards (OWL 2 and RDF). Two projects are introduced, namely Harlock900 and PRiSMHA, carried out in collaboration with local cultural institutions owning rich historical archives. In particular, the paper describes the computational ontologies supporting the approach, and then focuses on two case studies showing that our framework provides better results if compared with standard access systems. The case studies show the enhancement provided by a semantically rich representation of time intervals and a detailed formal description of events and their participants.

Section: Our Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Projects and The Two Case Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

A Semantic Web Approach to Enable a Smart Route to Historical Archives

Magro

Baldo

2019

JWE

Self Cite

“…This implies that the system needs a detailed semantic knowledge of the domain, i.e. of topics of the documents: in PRiSMHA, such knowledge is provided by computational ontologies (see Section 3), which represent the system conceptual "vocabulary" (Goy et al, 2015) for expressing the semantically rich metadata layer. This layer consists in a knowledge base containing a formal, machine-readable full-fledged description of the content of archival documents.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Building Semantic Metadata for Historical Archives through an Ontology-driven User Interface

J. Comput. Cult. Herit.

Colla

Magro

et al. 2020

Self Cite

Historical archives represent an immense wealth, the potential of which is endangered by the lack of effective management and access tools. We believe that this issue can be faced by providing archive catalogs with a semantic layer, containing rich semantic metadata, representing the content of documents in a full-fledged formal machine-readable format. In this paper we present the contribution offered in this direction by the PRiSMHA project, in which the conceptual vocabulary of the semantic layer is represented by computational ontologies. However, acquiring semantic knowledge represents a well-known bottleneck for knowledge-based systems: in order to solve this problem, PRiSMHA relies on a crowdsourcing collaborative model, i.e., an online community of users who collaborate in building semantic representations of the content of archival documents. In this perspective, this paper aims at answering the following research question: Starting from the axioms characterizing concepts in the computational ontology underlying the system, how can we derive a user interface enabling users to formally represent the content of archival documents by exploiting the conceptual vocabulary provided by the ontology? Our solution includes the following steps: (a) A manually defined configuration, acting as a pre-filter, to hide "unsuited" classes, properties, and relations; (b) An algorithm, combining heuristics and reasoning, which extracts from the ontology all and only the "compatible" properties and relations, given an entity (event) type. (c) A set of strategies to rank, group, and present the entity (event) properties and relations, based on the results of a study with users. This integrated solution enabled us to design an ontology-driven user interface enabling users to characterize entities, and in particular (historical) events, on the basis of the vocabulary provided by the ontology.

“…However, a detailed knowledge about what individual archival documents talk about is precisely what is needed to provide an effective, intelligent and engaging access to historical archives. The idea that a semantically rich metadata layer is required in order to enhance the access to archival resources is shared in the Digital Humanities community; see, for instance, (Motta et al, 2000;Goy et al, 2015).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Bringing Semantics into Historical Archives with Computer-aided Rich Metadata Generation

Colla

J. Comput. Cult. Herit.

Leontino

et al. 2022

Self Cite

This paper relies on the idea that a semantically rich metadata layer is required in order to provide an effective, intelligent and engaging access to historical archives. However, building such a semantic layer represents a well-known bottleneck that can be overcome only by a hybrid strategy, integrating user-generated content and automatic techniques. The PRiSMHA project provides a contribution in this direction with the design and development of the prototype of an ontology-driven platform supporting users in semantic metadata generation. In particular, the main contribution of this paper is to show how automatic information extraction techniques (namely, Named Entity and Temporal Expression Recognition), and information retrieved from external datasets in the LOD cloud can support users in the identification and characterization of new entities to annotate documents with.