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Cultural Heritage and Digital Humanities have become major application fields of Linked Data and Semantic Web technologies. This editorial introduces the special issue of the Semantic Web (SWJ) journal on Semantic Web for Cultural Heritage. In total 30 submissions for the call of papers were received, of which 11 were selected for publication. The papers cover a wide spectrum of modelled topics related to language, reading and writing, narratives, historical events and cultural artefacts, while describing reusable methodologies and tools for cultural data management. This issue indicates and demonstrates the high potential of Semantic Web technologies for applications in the Cultural Heritage domain.

This paper aims at showing how integrating the Archive of the Italian Latinity of the Middle Ages (ALIM) into the ILC4CLARIN repository can provide mutual benefits. Making ALIM available to a large community of scholars and researchers, on the one side, represents the first step to reduce the lack of resources for Medieval Latin in CLARIN and, on the other side, constitutes an unprecedented contribution to not only linguistic investigations, but also to the studies of the culture and science at the basis of the Western European society. The paper describes the adopted approach aiming to keep intact the structure of the archive and its metadata, which are both accurately mirrored into the ILC4CLARIN repository in order to maintain existing access practices of the users. This structure can be found in exactly the same state within the CLARIN VLO. Finally, the paper illustrates the advantages of experimenting with some ALIM data, once introduced within the CLARIN Language Resource Switchboard service: first results are shown from the analysis of some texts with the UDPipe tool suite and the distant reading tool Voyant.

International audience; In this paper, we present an online communication-driven decision support system to align terms from a dataset with terms of another dataset (standardized controlled vocabulary or not). Heterotoki differs from existing proposals in that it takes place at the interface with humans, inviting the experts to commit on their definitions, so as to either agree to validate the mapping or to propose some enrichment to the terminologies. More precisely, differently to most of existing proposals that support terminology alignment, Heterotoki sustains the negotiation of meaning thanks to semantic coordination support within its interface design. This negotiation involves domain experts having produced multiple datasets.

Over the last decade Digital Humanities has ceased being a “niche discipline” and have become a major phenomenon in academic and cultural debate. Significant scientific results and outcomes have been achieved, and fundamental research infrastructures have been realized. Despite these far-reaching outcomes, Digital Humanities still does not have a satisfactory influence in the traditional disciplinary fields. We need to find new methods to deal with cultural artifacts and texts. Amongst the many emerging research fields in the DH, two come forth as the most promising and interesting: Big Data and distant reading; Semantic Web and Linked Open Data. In my paper I will argue that Big Data in the Humanities, although very promising, have some critical issues, and I will propose the idea of a Semantic Cultural and Literary Web, a collaborative infrastructure based on ontology driven semantic annotation of primary resources.  Over the last decade Digital Humanities has ceased being a “niche discipline” and have become a major phenomenon in academic and cultural debate. Significant scientific results and outcomes have been achieved, and fundamental research infrastructures have been realized. Despite these far-reaching outcomes, Digital Humanities still does not have a satisfactory influence in the traditional disciplinary fields. We need to find new methods to deal with cultural artifacts and texts. Amongst the many emerging research fields in the DH, two come forth as the most promising and interesting: Big Data and distant reading; Semantic Web and Linked Open Data. In my paper I will argue that Big Data in the Humanities, although very promising, have some critical issues, and I will propose the idea of a Semantic Cultural and Literary Web, a collaborative infrastructure based on ontology driven semantic annotation of primary resources.

This document is Deliverable 6.1, "Impact Assessment document", elaborated in the context of E-RIHS PP, WP-06, Task 6.4. The two analysis of this task have been outsourced and, following a public tender, the procurer organization is Centre for Industrial Studies (CSIL), located in Milano, Italy.

One of the main goals of the PARTHENOS project (Pooling Activities, Resources and Tools for Heritage E-research Networking, Optimization and Synergies - EC-H2020-RIA grant agreement 654119) is to bridge existing DHIs by forming a federation where researchers of different sectors of the Humanities can collaborate, share data, services and tools in an integrated environment. PARTHENOS will produce a complete technical framework for the federation, enabling transparent access to resources managed by different DHIs and enabling the creation and operation of Virtual Research Environments where researchers with different backgrounds can collaborate on specific research topics.

This article has been accepted for publication by EUP in the IJHAC: International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing (https://www.euppublishing.com/loi/ijhac); International audience; Since the first ESFRI roadmap in 2006, multiple humanities Research Infrastructures (RIs) have been set up all over the European continent, supporting archaeologists (ARIADNE), linguists (CLARIN-ERIC), Holocaust researchers (EHRI), cultural heritage specialists (IPERION-CH) and others. These examples only scratch the surface of the breadth of research communities that have benefited from close cooperation in the European Research Area.While each field developed discipline-specific services over the years, common themes can also be distinguished. All humanities RIs address, in varying degrees, questions around research data management, the use of standards and the desired interoperability of data across disciplinary boundaries.This article sheds light on how cluster project PARTHENOS developed pooled services and shared solutions for its audience of humanities researchers, RI managers and policymakers. In a time where the convergence of existing infrastructure is becoming ever more important – with the construction of a European Open Science Cloud as an audacious, ultimate goal – we hope that our experiences inform future work and provide inspiration on how to exploit synergies in interdisciplinary, transnational, scientific cooperation.

Oral archives and digital technologies have gone hand-in-hand for a very long time. Both sides benefit from this interdisciplinary junction: technology enhances the preservation and diffusion of oral materials, while exploiting them to develop cutting-edge tools for their treatment. This chapter deals with an Italian instantiation of this mutual relationship: the Archivio Vi.Vo. project. Offering innovative solutions concerning metadata, audio restoration, description, and access, Archivio Vi.Vo. aims to build an online platform to host the oral archives from Tuscany. The project is powered by CLARIN-IT, which guarantees its compliance with standards and offers resources for data access and discoverability. Archivio Vi.Vo. has not been built from scratch: it is instead a cross-fertilization of previous initiatives and research projects (e.g., the Gra.fo project). Moreover, the chapter presents the related, contemporary work of a multidisciplinary group striving to synthesize a Vademecum for future generations of oral archive researchers. Lastly, a brief list of tentative ideas for future developments of the Archivio Vi.Vo. platform will be presented.

This current PhD thesis aims at researching solutions to the long-standing gap in the research infrastructure field of formal modelling and discovery of information. Research Infrastructures (RIs) are facilities, resources and services used by the research community to conduct research and promote innovation. They provide access to tools, data and algorithms, pooled on working environments named Virtual Research Environments (VREs). Due to their nature, Research Infrastructures (RIs) are a heterogeneous landscape of resource types and diverse, often redundant, models for describing the same resource entities. Such diversity drastically diminishes the capabilities of a consistent fruition of the knowledge and skills available within an infrastructure, and ultimately limits the creation of federations of RI. The current state of knowledge in the field is even more complex due to the emerging concept of Hybrid Data Infrastructures (HDIs), which combine on-premises resources with resources provisioned by cloud and/or grid computing infrastructures. The focus of this study is to address the critical aspects of this heterogeneity and provides to the research infrastructure field both the conceptual and analytical instruments for expanding the scale at which the infrastructures currently operate. The following research questions are investigated in this study: - Research question 1: Is it possible to formalise a uniform resource model to seamlessly federate research infrastructures? - Research question 2: To what extent do state-of-the-art discovery algorithms need to be amended to properly handle VREs across Hybrid Data Infrastructures? - Research question 3: To what extent does the interface of a discovery service can support the new model and algorithms? First objective is attained with the definition of a resource model open by design. An accurate mathematical notation presents a minimal but powerful model consisting of few constructs. This is an abstract model, which can be instantiated to accommodate almost every possible scenario. Second objective is confronted with the design of a novel communication model based on the concept of transaction. Transactional models are not a new idea; rather they have been extensively described in the literature since the 80s. However, this work identifies a misapplication of these models in the context of research infrastructure and proposes changes to support the emerging requirements in the field. Lastly, the third objective refers to the impact that the first two questions have on architectural aspects of the services devoted to distribute the information in a research infrastructure. This point is deeply investigated with a detailed design of a production-ready solution to prove the validity and accuracy of the theoretical aspects of this thesis. The originality of the proposed thesis consists also in its methodology. In fact, this dissertation offers an innovative analytical and methodological approach to address these research questions. A key-enabling component of modern Hybrid Data Infrastructures, the Information System (IS), is used as platform to validate this work. An IS is central to all the themes tackled in this thesis. It exploits the resource model, plays the role of registry inside the infrastructure, deals with an intensive communication with all the other actors and works with the heterogeneity of such a context. Its ultimate goal is to provide uniform views of the resources assigned to each VRE, regardless of their origin. The study presented in this thesis has been conducted within the InfraScience group, the research group pioneering the Enabling Scientific Data Infrastructures field in the past two decades. The group operates at the Institute of Information Science and Technologies (ISTI), an institute of the Italian National Research Council (CNR). This invaluable environment provided a unique ground to develop and validate the theories illustrated in the thesis. Focusing on the validation, the abstract resource model has been instantiated in the gCube model of the D4Science HDI, while the transactional model has been translated in the design of the IS, successfully implemented and adopted by the same HDI. The dissertation carries innovative theoretical, methodological and analytical value in the research infrastructure field and especially in the emerging Hybrid Data Infrastructures. Importantly, this work has been validated in one of the most challenging contexts available. The thesis is organised in chapters: Chapters 1 and 2 describe the problem statement; Chapter 3 provides a state-of-the-art overview of the problem; Chapter 4 develops the theoretical framework by describing both the abstract and gCube resource models; Chapters 5 presents transaction model, how it can be used, and why it focuses on the transaction technique; Chapter 6 offers the core methodological support with the description of the IS to support the abstract resource model and the transaction model and; Chapters 7 and 8 conclude with the validation of proposed study and the contribution to the literature it provides.

The ongoing EU funded INCEPTION project proposes a significant improvement in the 3D modelling for the enhancement of Cultural Heritage knowledge by the use of a BIM approach for the semantic enrichment and management of models. Indeed, when used in the CH field, semantic BIM will be able to connect different users (e.g. scholars, technicians, citizens, governments), supporting the need for interpretation of the cultural heritage model.