ATLAS

The ATLAS of Italian Digital Humanities: a dynamic knowledge graph of digital scholarly research on Italian Cultural Heritage

Contatti
Abstract
The goal of the ATLAS is to create a knowledge graph of the international scholarly research on Italian Cultural Heritage leveraged in a Web portal that fosters users’ interpretation and engagement. The Atlas aims to collect, enrich, and provide information extracted from online resources produced in the international academic context, such as digital textual corpora and editions (mostly based on the TEI/XML standard) as well as datasets following Linked Open Data principles and databases, but also ontologies and tools adopted in the community.  The ATLAS leverages existing digital heritage resources to develop an innovative system wherein scholarly projects are reused in new non-native environments. Digital Humanities (DH) is a research field focused on the realisation of Web-based projects wherein to collect authoritative data related to our heritage. However, research outputs are often not easy to discover, and risk obsolescence if not well documented and based on shared guidelines and standards. Moreover, projects are often self-referential, do not follow metadata standards and best practices, and users’ experience is limited in exploration, since interlinking and explanations - including contradictory statements or disagreement - are missing. In this project we want to show the potential deriving from having shared protocols, good practices, guidelines and evaluation frameworks in the Humanities. In order to tackle these problems in real-world scenarios, a pool of selected sources will be harvested, mined, and reengineered with state-of-the-art Semantic Web technologies and Natural Language Processing methods to define guidelines for excellent projects and create a golden set of reference projects in the Digital Humanities. The aim is to collect sources that are published according to shareable criteria, that can be easily mined to extract research topics, inter and intra-textual relations between sources, as well as bibliographic, literary, and thematic data. Data extracted will be reconciled with international authority records (e.g. VIAF) and open data sources (e.g. Wikidata) to facilitate reuse and the development of mashup applications. Finally, enhanced data will be preserved and leveraged in a dedicated platform to support exploration and discovery of the landscape of DH projects, and will provide suggestions on tools and resources to scholars that are planning new projects. The semantics added to mined data will guarantee knowledge discovery and a correct reuse of resources in new projects. The ATLAS Web platform will advance the state of the art of DH research by fostering FAIRness of humanities research data, increasing their findability, and reusability, while allowing scholars, teachers, and students to perform data-driven research on high-quality scholarly data. New digital resources will be admitted into the Atlas on the basis of a peer review process. Criteria will be formalised in guidelines, protocols, and tutorials.

Durata

25 Months

Istituto finanziario

Ministeriale/Governativo