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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.

AbstractThe paper presents Intergraph, a graph-based visual analytics technical demonstrator for the exploration and study of content in historical document collections. The designed prototype is motivated by a practical use case on a corpus of circa 15.000 digitized resources about European integration since 1945. The corpus allowed generating a dynamic multilayer network which represents different kinds of named entities appearing and co-appearing in the collections. To our knowledge, Intergraph is one of the first interactive tools to visualize dynamic multilayer graphs for collections of digitized historical sources. Graph visualization and interaction methods have been designed based on user requirements for content exploration by non-technical users without a strong background in network science, and to compensate for common flaws with the annotation of named entities. Users work with self-selected subsets of the overall data by interacting with a scene of small graphs which can be added, altered and compared. This allows an interest-driven navigation in the corpus and the discovery of the interconnections of its entities across time.

Since the end of the 1980s the historiographical context has changed considerably. Over the course of the last ten years, we have reached the “digital age” and computers as well as resources available via the Internet have become indispensable tools for all researchers. Be it for the stage of documentation or for actual writing, we are now living and working in a context where historians can no longer completely refuse all IT tools. As long as there are no solid, durable, large-scale training efforts to equip all historians with the skills to use the new and old IT tools, their potential is necessarily limited. While there have been studies on “researchers” in general and also on political scientists in particular, there has, to our knowledge, been no scientific study which would allow us to reach conclusions on the use of IT tools and digital resources by French historians. It is thus difficult to reach conclusions on a larger scale and we have decided to base our analysis on our own experience in order to consider what could be the transformations of the historian’s craft in the digital age. We will thus proceed first to a series of conclusions based on our activities in mediation (teaching and blogging), before proposing a typology of the principal evolutions. We will conclude with a certain number of propositions as far as training of historians is concerned.

Research in theoretical and computer-based archaeology, from the 1950s onwards, established important perspectives for the formal representation and analysis of tangible cultural entities such as complex artefacts, iconographic compositions and archaeological assemblages, and became a precursor for the emergence of knowledge-based tools, methodologies and standards for artefact-centred information systems in contemporary museums. One particular case in point is CLIO, a semantic information system intended for research use, developed by ICS/FORTH and the Benaki Museum in Greece in the early 1990s, which became a foundation for the definition of the Conceptual Reference Model of the International Documentation Committee of ICOM (CIDOC CRM), recently adopted as the ISO standard for cultural information representation. It is argued here that, as the capabilities of computer applications to provide access to complex, multimedia cultural information increase, so does also the validity and importance of earlier research advances in artefact-centred archaeological computing; and, conversely, that the advent of digital infrastructures for material culture disciplines such as archaeology highlights the pertinence, and potential benefits, of further work on archaeological formal analysis and knowledge representation.

International audience; Academic dictionary writing is making greater and greater use of the TEI Guidelines’ dictionary module. And as increasing numbers of TEI dictionaries become available, there is an ever more palpable need to work towards greater interoperability among dictionary writing systems and other language resources that are needed by dictionaries and dictionary tools. In particular this holds true for the crucial role that statistical data obtained from language resources play in lexicographic workflow—a role that also has to be reflected in the model of the data produced in these workflows. Presenting a range of current projects, the authors address two main questions in this area: How can the relationship between a dictionary and other language resources be conceptualized, irrespective of whether they are used in the production of the dictionary or to enrich existing lexicographic data? And how can this be documented using the TEI Guidelines? Discussing a variety of options, this paper proposes a customization of the TEI dictionary module that tries to respond to the emerging requirements in an environment of increasingly intertwined language resources.

Autorzy prezentują założenia metodologiczne i ich praktyczne implikacje w zakresie danych badawczych wykorzystywanych w badaniach literackich. Na podstawie własnych badań i konsultacji z literaturoznawcami proponują typologię danych badawczych w literaturoznawstwie oraz analizują cztery formy publikowania danych w tej dyscyplinie: deponowanie pliku, monografię multimedialną, cyfrową edycję naukową i prace dokumentacyjne. Ostatnia część artykułu zawiera praktyczne sugestie dotyczące postępowania z danymi na różnych etapach projektu literaturoznawczego. This article presents the methodological foundations and practical implications of research data use in literary studies. Drawing on their own research and consultations with Polish literary scholars, the authors propose a typology of research data in literary studies. They go on to discuss four types of data publication in this discipline: file depositing, multimedia monographs, digital scholarly editions and documentary publications. The final section of the article offers practical suggestions for handling data at various stages of a literary studies project.

الوحي كلمة تدلُّ على معانٍ؛ منها: الإشارة، والإيماء، والكتابة، والسرعة، والصوت، والإلقاء في الروع إلهامًا وبسرعة وبشدَّة، ليبقى أثره في النفس، وأصله: إعلامٌ في خفاء، وله صورٌ عِدَّة، وهي كلُّها تتمُّ في خفاء، فهو الإشارة السريعة، ولتضمُّنه السُّرعة قيل: أمرٌ وحي للكلام على سبيل الرمز

Research in the digital humanities often involves vague information, either because our objects of study lack clearly defined boundaries, or because our knowledge about them is incomplete or hypothetical, which is especially true in disciplines about our past (such as history, archaeology, and classical studies). Most techniques used to represent data vagueness emerged from natural sciences, and lack the expressiveness that would be ideal for humanistic contexts. Building on previous work, we present here a conceptual framework based on the ConML modelling language for the expression of information vagueness in digital humanities. In addition, we propose an implementation on non-relational data stores, which are becoming popular within the digital humanities. Having clear implementation guidelines allow us to employ search engines or big data systems (commonly implemented using non-relational approaches) to handle the vague aspects of information. The proposed implementation guidelines have been validated in practice, and show how we can query a vagueness-aware system without a large penalty in analytical and processing power. This research was partially funded by Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry, and Competitiveness under its Competitive Juan de la Cierva Postdoctoral Research Programme, grant FJCI-2016-28032. Peer reviewed

This article shows that metadata plays a central role in our society and concludes that through collaborative work, it is possible to pool solutions and to establish relationships of cooperation, both at the level of practical tool development and with regard to sharing and creating knowledge and know-how. ispartof: ABB: Archives et Bibliothèques de Belgique - Archief- en Bibliotheekwezen in België vol:106 pages:135-144 status: published