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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.

Social sciences and humanities (SSH) research is divided across a wide array of disciplines, sub-disciplines and languages. While this specialization makes it possible to investigate the extensive variety of SSH topics, it also leads to a fragmentation that prevents SSH research from reaching its full potential. The TRIPLE project brings answers to these issues by developing an innovative discovery platform for SSH data, researchers’ projects and profiles. Having started in October 2019, the project has already three main achievements that are presented in this paper: (1) the definition of main features of the GOTRIPLE platform; (2) its interoperability; (3) its multilingual, multicultural and interdisciplinary vocation. These results have been achieved thanks to different methodologies such as a co-design process, market analysis and benchmarking, monitoring and co-building. These preliminary results highlight the need for respecting diversity of practices and communities through coordination and harmonization.

The National Research Council of Italy (CNR) is involved in the E-Cabin project, which aims to create a futuristic and intelligent cabin in order both to improve the well- being and satisfaction of passengers and to minimize the on-board waste by using advanced consumption control.

The core of the UPSKILLS project is constituted by the creation of learning content dedicated to topics deemed to be of particular importance for twenty-first century students of languages and linguistics. This learning content should help students acquire the knowledge and skills needed for the contemporary job market, which offers numerous new opportunities both within and beyond traditional language-oriented professions, but which also requires skills not typically included, or at least insufficiently present in university curricula. However, UPSKILLS is not alone in wishing to bring the knowledge and skills of language and linguistics students more up-to-date with the job market, and some resources relevant for the topics it aims to address have already been created in other projects, within university curricula or in other related contexts. In order to avoid duplicating materials that have already been made available by others, the first step in the creation of UPSKILLS learning content is the present overview of existing materials.

Despite the hype, the effective implementation of Open Science is hindered by several cultural and technical barriers. Researchers embraced digital science, use “digital laboratories” (e.g. research infrastructures, thematic services) to conduct their research and publish research data, but practices and tools are still far from achieving the expectations of transparency and reproducibility of Open Science. The places where science is performed and the places where science is published are still regarded as different realms. Publishing is still a post-experimental, tedious, manual process, too often limited to articles, in some contexts semantically linked to datasets, rarely to software, generally disregarding digital representations of experiments. In this work we present the OpenAIRE Research Community Dashboard (RCD), designed to overcome some of these barriers for a given research community, minimizing the technical efforts and without renouncing any of the community services or practices. The RCD flanks digital laboratories of research communities with scholarly communication tools for discovering and publishing interlinked scientific products such as literature, datasets, and software. The benefits of the RCD are show-cased by means of two real-case scenarios: the European Marine Science community and the European Plate Observing System (EPOS) research infrastructure. This work is partly funded by the OpenAIRE-Advance H2020 project (grant number: 777541; call: H2020-EINFRA-2017) and the OpenAIREConnect H2020 project (grant number: 731011; call: H2020-EINFRA-2016-1). Moreover, we would like to thank our colleagues Michele Manunta, Francesco Casu, and Claudio De Luca (Institute for the Electromagnetic Sensing of the Environment, CNR, Italy) for their work on the EPOS infrastructure RCD; and Stephane Pesant (University of Bremen, Germany) his work on the European Marine Science RCD. First Online 30 August 2019

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.

In the framework of the H2020 INDIGO-DataCloud project, we have implemented an advanced solution for the automatic deployment of digital data repositories based on Invenio, the digital library framework developed by CERN. Exploiting cutting-edge technologies, such as Docker and Apache Mesos, and standard specifications to describe application architectures such as TOSCA, we are able to provide a service that simplifies the process of creating and managing repositories of various digital assets using cloud resources. An Invenio-based repository consists of a set of services (e.g. database, message queue, cache, workers and frontend) that need to be properly installed, configured and linked together. These operations, along with the provisioning of the resources and their monitoring and maintenance, can be challenging for individual researchers or small-to-moderate-sized research groups. To this purpose, the INDIGO-DataCloud platform provides advanced features for orchestrating the deployment of complex virtual infrastructures on distributed cloud environments: it is able to provision the required resources automatically over heterogeneous and/or hybrid cloud infrastructures and to configure them automatically ensuring dynamic elasticity and resilience. This approach has been successfully adapted to support the needs of the researchers and scholars in the domain of the Digital Arts and Humanities.

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.