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Western thought in European history was mainly affected by the image of the world created during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The most popular reason to travel during the Middle Ages was taking a pilgrimage. Jerusalem, Rome, and Santiago de Compostela were the most popular destinations. It is not surprising that a lot of works written by travellers as guides for pilgrims exist. By the beginning of the Renaissance, a more precise image of the world was defined, thanks to the discovery of ancient geographical models, especially the work of Ptolemy. The Italian National Research Project (PRIN) IMAGO --- Index Medii Aevi Geographiae Operum --- (2020-2023) aims to provide a systematic overview of the medieval and renaissance Latin geographical literature using the Semantic Web technologies and the LOD paradigm. Indeed, until now, this literature has not been studied using digital methods. In particular, this article presents how we formally represented the knowledge about the toponyms, or place names, in the IMAGO ontology. To maximise the interoperability, we developed the IMAGO ontology as an extension of two reference vocabularies: the CIDOC CRM and its extension FRBRoo, including its in-progress reformulation, LRMoo. Furthermore, we used Wikidata as reference knowledge base. As case study, we chose to represent the knowledge related to the toponyms cited by the Italian poet Dante Alighieri in his Latin works. We carried out a first experiment for visualising the knowledge about these toponyms on a map and in the form of tables and CSV files.

This deliverable presents the activities carried out by the partners during the second half of the ARIADNEplus project within Work Package 14 (WP14 - JRA3 - The ARIADNEplus knowledge management system) and describes the results of the four WP14 tasks: Task 14.1 – Monitoring knowledge integration (JRA3.1) Task 14.2 – Application profiles (JRA3.2) Task 14.3 – Vocabularies and gazetteers (JRA3.3) Task 14.4 – Assessing the CRM extensions (JRA3.4). The overall objectives of WP14 are presented in Section 2 while Sections 3, 4, 5 and 6 present the detailed work in Tasks 14.1, 14.2, 14.3 and 14.4 respectively. Work in WP14 is closely related to other work packages and more specifically to WP4 where the ARIADNEplus ontology and specific extensions, the application profiles, to specific sub-domains of archaeology and archaeological science, are being implemented. Deliverables of WP4 provide a detailed description of the AO-Cat (D4.2 - Initial report on ontology implementation) and the progress on the application profiles (D4.4 - Final report on ontology implementation, due at the end of the project). Whenever necessary, references to other deliverables will be provided. Overall, the activities of WP14 were carried out successfully and with very good cooperation with other interlinked work packages such as WP4, 5, and 12. Activity Dash, integrated into the projects’ infrastructure, was used to monitor the aggregation process, with 62 active workflows creating and recording the aggregation progress status of all the data providers. The development of the application profiles was carried out in close collaboration between the partners of 14.2 and 4.4 and led to the release of four stable fundamental application profiles for the specific research domains of inscriptions, marks, graffiti and other textual entities, ancient DNA analysis, heritage science scientific analysis and mortuary archaeology. The classes and properties that constitute each application profile are borrowed from existing ontological models or derived from them and are fully compatible with the AO-Cat general model and the CIDOC CRM, which form the backbone of ARIADNEplus. Work on multilingual vocabularies was carried out in close collaboration with WP5 on vocabulary integration via mappings from partner vocabularies to the Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) and via the PeriodO framework for temporal periods (see also WP5 Deliverables and the User Manual for the ARIADNEplus Data Aggregation Pipeline). The assessment of the CRM extensions included testing integrated data from the fields of numismatics, epigraphies and mortuary archaeology. A semantic search demonstrator was built to query and test the numismatic and epigraphic data integrated to the item-level. The mapping of Thanados1 database to the infrastructure was used to test the mortuary data AP., {"references":["AAT. 2022. About the AAT. https://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabularies/aat/about.html","Aspöck, E., Theodoridou, M., Felicetti, A. 2022. Types of burial data and proposal of a Mortuary Data Application Profile for ARIADNEplus (WP4.4.14) (1.2). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7243781","Binding, C., Tudhope, D., Vlachidis, A. 2019. A study of semantic integration across archaeological data and reports in different languages. Journal of Information Science, 45(3), 364- 386. https://doi.org/10.1177/0165551518789874","Eichert, S. (2021). Digital Mapping of Medieval Cemeteries: Case Studies from Austria and Czechia. Journal of Computational Cultural Heritage 14, 1 (3), pp. 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1145/3406535","Haperen, M.C. van (Leiden University) (2017): In Touch with the Dead: Early Medieval Grave Reopenings in the Low Countries. DANS. https://doi.org/10.17026/dans-x6b-bvgj","Harpring P. 2022. Getty Vocabularies: Issues Surrounding Diversity and Inclusion. Presentation at 20th European Networked Knowledge Organization Systems (NKOS) Workshop, JCDL 2022. https://nkoseu. github.io/2022/content/NKOS2022-presentation-harpring.pdf","PeriodO 2022. A gazetteer of period definitions for linking and visualizing data http://perio.do/","Shaw R, Rabinowitz A, Golden P, Kansa E. 2016. A sharing-oriented design strategy for Networked Knowledge Organization Systems. International Journal on Digital Libraries, 17(1), 49-61. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00799-015-0164-0","Tzompanaki, K., & Doerr, M. (2012). Fundamental Categories and Relationships for Intuitive querying CIDOC-CRM based repositories. https://publications.ics.forth.gr/tech-reports/2012/2012.TR429_Intuitive_querying_CIDOC-CRM.pdf","Tzompanaki, K., & Doerr, M. (2012). A New Framework For Querying Semantic Networks. Museums and the Web 2012: the international conference for culture and heritage on-line, San Diego, CA, USA, April 11-14."]}

International audience; According to a standard definition in information technology, an ontology is “a formal specification of a shared conceptualisation of a domain of interest”. The domain of social life is quite relevant not only for historical research but of course more generally for humanities and social sciences. It is therefore evident how interesting it would be to develop a widely used ontology for this domain, with different degrees of abstraction, allowing interoperability of research data in line with the FAIR principles. As a matter of fact we can observe that many projects model and produce data about social roles of persons, memberships in groups, economic and political activity, trends and conflicts in public opinion and societies, etc. The challenge appears then to find a conceptualisation that offers a high-level model of social life allowing for the integration of information in this domain of discourse, with an approach that is sufficiently robust to be accepted and used by specialists from different scientific disciplines.This talk presents a possible response to this challenge in three steps. In a first step, it outlines the usefulness of adopting CIDOC CRM as a domain ontology for research in the humanities and social sciences, but also the limitations of this ontology when analysed from the point of view of foundational ontologies like DOLCE Lite Plus, and therefore the need to introduce an extension dedicated to social life. It will also present the efforts undertaken over the last few years by George Bruseker and myself to develop, from different perspectives and in the context of different user communities, an extension of CIDOC CRM dedicated to social life, called CRMsoc, which is currently being discussed in the CIDOC CRM Special Interest Group (SIG).In a second step, the talk introduces the concept of intentionality, individual and collective, which has been analysed in depth in social philosophy, and described in a particularly precise and meaningful way by John Searle, and which can serve as a key to understanding social life and as a foundation for an ontology of this domain of discourse. The concept of intentionality is closely related to the one of representations, which is used in the social sciences to analyse the construction of the identity of individuals and their understanding of their role as social subjects.Finally, in a third step, the core classes of an extension of the CIDOC CRM for social life will be presented, with a discussion of their relation to some relevant classes in CRMbase. The talk will also show how this high level model can be specialised to deal with different topics such as people’s roles in society, membership in organisations, laws and their applications, object classifications and the projects of individuals and groups, i.e. relevant aspects of social life. This endeavour is implemented and documented in ontome.net. This web application was developed in order to allow different projects to participate in the discussion of the shared conceptualisation and to align their own models, or add more specific extensions according to the needs of their research agenda.

International audience

International audience; The article presents the use of CIDOC-CRM to model and represent knowledge related to the mining sector in the Hauts-de-France. It describes the methodology of domain ontology construction in 3 steps: (1) definition of the mining heritage domain, (2) construction of a structured terminology, (3) formalization into a domain ontology in OWL format. After presenting a brief overview of work on the formalization of knowledge using semantic web technologies, we present our approach, which we illustrate with an example from the analysis of interviews conducted with actors in the field.; L’article présente l’utilisation du CIDOC-CRM pour modéliser et représenter les connaissances relatives au domaine minier des Hauts-de-France. Il décrit la méthodologie de construction de l’ontologie de domaine en 3 étapes : (1) définition du domaine du patrimoine minier, (2) construction d’une terminologie structurée, (3) formalisation en une ontologie de domaine au format OWL. Après avoir présenté un bref état des travaux portant sur la formalisation des connaissances à partir des technologies du web sémantique, nous présentons notre démarche que nous illustrons avec un exemple issu de l’analyse des entretiens menés auprès d’acteurs du domaine.

In this paper the formal OntoBelliniLetters ontology is described concerning the corpus of Vincenzo Bellini's letters kept at the Belliniano Civic Museum of Catania. This ontology is part of a wider project - the BellinInRete project - one of whose aims is the development of a more general and complete ontology for the whole Vincenzo Bellini's legacy preserved in the Museum. The main concepts and relations building up the ontology knowledge base are described and discussed and some formal properties of them are presented. The ontology schema is inspired by the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (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.

Die Forschung zum Informationsverhalten in Archiven hat wiederholt gezeigt, dass der Zugang zu Archivbeständen durch einen grundlegenden Wissensmangel über die Informationsbedürfnisse von Archivnutzern eingeschränkt wird. Das Ziel der vorliegenden Studie ist die Vertiefung des empirischen Verständnisses der spezifischen Informationsbedürfnisse von Archivnutzern und damit die Leistung eines grundlegenden Beitrags zur Verbesserung von archivischen Informationssystemen. Dazu untersucht die primäre Forschungsfrage die Möglichkeit der Erarbeitung einer Ontologie, die in angemessener Weise das Erkenntnisinteresse von Nutzern an Archive repräsentiert, und auf formale Anfragen, adäquate Antworten erzeugt. Zu diesem Zweck analysiert die Studie schriftliche Nutzeranfragen an das Bundesarchiv und das Nationalarchiv von Norwegen (Arkivverket). Die primären Forschungsergebnisse umfassen einen methodischen Ansatz, der eine interpretative Analyse schriftlich formulierter Fragen an Archive vertritt und, als Ergebnis seiner erfolgreichen Anwendung, das Archival Knowledge Model (AKM) erarbeitet. Das AKM ist eine ontologische Repräsentation des Gegenstandbereichs, der typischerweise als das Erkenntnisinteresse von Fragen an Archiven erscheint. Die Studie zeigt, dass derartige Anfragen dominante, grundlegende ontologische Muster aufweisen, die auf einen relativ kleinen Satz ontologischer Entitäten formalisiert werden können. Das AKM repräsentiert damit formal und explizit die Informationsbedürfnisse von Archivnutzern in Form einer Ontologie. Diese stellt ein konstitutives Modell für die Evaluierung bestehender Archivinformationssysteme und Datenschemata zur Verfügung und kann die Entwicklung neuer Katalogisierungsregeln oder musterbasierter Abfrageanwendungen unterstützen. Research on the information behaviour of archive users has repeatedly shown that access to archival knowledge bases such as via finding aids is hindered by a certain deficiency in knowledge about users and their information needs. The objective of this study is to increase our empirical understanding of the information needs of archive users in order to facilitate access to archival information systems. The primary research question explores the possibility of creating an ontology that can reasonably represent archival inquiries and their probable interpretations as formal queries to the model of the archival target world that would generate an adequate response. For this purpose, the study analyzes archival information needs as expressed in written natural language questions submitted to the German Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv) and the National Archives of Norway (Arkivverket). The primary results point to a methodological approach that advocates an interpretative analysis of written natural language inquiries and, as the result of its practical and successful application, the Archival Knowledge Model (AKM). This constitutes an ontological representation of the subject matter typically appearing as the interest of archival inquiries. The study thus shows that written natural language questions submitted to archives exhibit dominant fundamental ontological patterns, which can be formalized to a relatively small set of entities utilizing the CIDOC CRM and compatible extensions wherever its semantics are found to be inadequate. The AKM formally and explicitly represents the information needs of archive users in the form of an ontology, thus providing a constitutive model for the evaluation of existing archive information systems and data schemas and may inform the development of new cataloguing rules or pattern-based query applications.

International audience

One of the main problems of the current Digital Libraries (DLs) is the limitation of the informative services offered to the user who aims at discovering the resources of the DL by queries in natural language. Indeed, all DLs provide simple search functionalities that return a ranked list of their resources. No semantic relation among the returned objects is usually reported that could help the user to obtain a more complete knowledge on the subject of the search. The introduction of the Semantic Web, and in particular of the Linked Data, has the potential of improving the search functionalities of DLs. In this context, the long-term aim of this thesis has been to introduce the narrative as new first-class search functionality. As output of a query, the envisaged new search functionality should not only return a list of objects but it should also present one or more narratives, composed of events that are linked to the objects of the existing libraries (e.g. Europeana) and are endowed with a set of semantic relations connecting these events into a meaningful semantic network. As a necessary step towards this direction, the thesis presents an ontology for representing narratives, along with a tool for the construction of narratives based on the ontology. Moreover, it has used to the tool for evaluating the ontology in the context of an experiment centred on the biography of the Italian poet Dante Alighieri, the major Italian poet of the late Middle Ages. More specifically: - An overview of the related works developed in the Semantic Web field and in Narratology, and especially in its sub branch named Computational Narratology was reported. The basic principles of Narratology and Computational Narratology have been reviewed along with the study of the Artificial Intelligence literature, especially of the Event Calculus theory, in order to identify the formal components of narratives. - A conceptualization of narratives has been developed, based on notions derived from narratology and Artificial Intelligence. According to this conceptualization, a narrative consists of a fabula, i.e. the events of a story in chronologically ordered, and several narrations of this fabula (plots), linked to the fabula by an event association relation. A mathematical expression of the conceptualization has been given, in order to provide a characterization of the conceptualization as clear and as precise as possible, also to be used as a basis for the subsequent development of an ontology of narratives, encoded in OWL. The proposed conceptualization has been validated by expressing it into an existing ontology, the CIDOC CRM, and by endowing it with provenance knowledge, also expressed in a derivation of the CRM, named CRMinf. This expression has been used in the validation experiment, consisting in the modelling a narrative of the biography of Dante Alighieri, provided by a biographer who has scientifically supported this research. - The population of the created ontology has been performed by means of a semiautomatic approach implemented by a tool for the construction of narratives which obey the ontology. This tool retrieves and assigns URIs to the instances of the classes of the ontology using Wikidata as external resource and also facilitates the construction and contextualization of events, and their linking to form the fabulae of narratives. - Finally, a qualitative validation of the developed ontology has been carried out. This validation has regarded the evaluation of: (i) the representational adequacy of the ontology by a Dante Alighieri's expert; (ii) the effectiveness of the narrative building tool; (iii) the satisfaction of the users' requirements defined at the beginning of the study. To prove the last point, initial requirements representing pre-requisites of this work have been satisfied by demonstrating that a SPARQL query can be always built to extract the requested information from the knowledge base embodying the narrative.

Current Digital Libraries (DLs) are mostly built around large collections of scarcely related objects. We aim at enriching the information space of DLs by introducing narratives, consisting of two main components: networks of events related to one another and to the DL resources through semantic links, and narrations of those events in texts. In order to introduce narratives in DLs, we developed a conceptualisation based on narratology and we expressed it using the CIDOC CRM and CRMinf as reference ontologies. We used this expression to validate our conceptualisation, creating a narrative of the biography of Dante Alighieri as a realistic case study. To support this experiment, we developed a semi-automated tool that collects basic knowledge about objects and events from Wikidata. The developed ontology is general enough to be not limited to create biographies but other types of narratives as well.

Version auteur de la communication présentée en juin 2012 lors des JIAP-2012, à paraître dans les Actes des 3e Journées d'Informatique et Archéologie de Paris - JIAP 2012.; CIDOC CRM : Ontology of Cultural Heritage Information applied to Ancient Objects. Ancient objects, material collected on archaeological sites or displayed by museums, carry information (type and material, decoration, location, etc.) and are subject to study (analysis, reproduction, publication, etc.). The CIDOC CRM is an ontology intended to facilitate the integration, mediation and interchange of cultural heritage information. More than the Dublin Core this standard allows the ability to structure the contextual information about the "life" of a complex object (composite, archaeological...) and to build a typology, a taxonomy. Associated with other documentary and technical standards, it optimizes the integration of this kind of knowledge into the Semantic Web and the Linked Data.; Document archéologique issu de fouilles ou conservé dans une collection, l'objet antique est à la fois porteur d'information (type et matériau, décor, localisations et contextes de production, d'usage, de découverte, etc.) et sujet d'étude (analyse, reproduction, publication, etc.). Ces connaissances, liées aux différentes étapes de sa vie ‒ création, utilisation, redécouverte, conservation ‒ sont prises en compte par le CIDOC CRM, ontologie de l'information relative au patrimoine culturel. Celle-ci permet une modélisation fine de l'information et une sémantisation des métadonnées plus riche que le Dublin Core, par exemple dans le cas d'une œuvre composite complexe, d'un objet trouvé lors d'une fouille archéologique, ou encore d'une typologie (original / réplique ; modèle conceptuel, taxon, etc.). Associée à des standards techniques et des vocabulaires de référence, elle favorise l'interopérabilité des données et l'insertion de celles-ci dans le Web sémantique et le Web de données.

International audience; The article presents the use of CIDOC-CRM to model and represent knowledge related to the mining sector in the Hauts-de-France. It describes the methodology of domain ontology construction in 3 steps: (1) definition of the mining heritage domain, (2) construction of a structured terminology, (3) formalization into a domain ontology in OWL format. After presenting a brief overview of work on the formalization of knowledge using semantic web technologies, we present our approach, which we illustrate with an example from the analysis of interviews conducted with actors in the field.; L’article présente l’utilisation du CIDOC-CRM pour modéliser et représenter les connaissances relatives au domaine minier des Hauts-de-France. Il décrit la méthodologie de construction de l’ontologie de domaine en 3 étapes : (1) définition du domaine du patrimoine minier, (2) construction d’une terminologie structurée, (3) formalisation en une ontologie de domaine au format OWL. Après avoir présenté un bref état des travaux portant sur la formalisation des connaissances à partir des technologies du web sémantique, nous présentons notre démarche que nous illustrons avec un exemple issu de l’analyse des entretiens menés auprès d’acteurs du domaine.