The digitalization of cultural materials is doubtless a key-enabler for
increasing accessibility of cultural heritage documents, e.g., historical texts. In the last
decade Semantic Digital Libraries (see, e.g., [
Particularly, cultural heritage documents are characterized by being
syntactically and semantically heterogeneous, multilingual, semantically rich, and highly
interlinked. They are produced in a distributed, open fashion by organizations
like museums, libraries, and archives, using their own established standards and
best practices [
In this extended abstract we present stole4, an ontology-based digital archive collecting some of the most relevant journal articles published between 1848 and 1946 concerning the legislative history of public administration in Italy. In stole we leverage ontologies for describing domain knowledge and providing semantic information integration among data in order to support historians' research. The documents stored in stole are regarded as a valuable source of information for historical research since through the study of these texts it is possible to trace the course of Italian history and often to nd out some unexplored but useful aspects about a particular event or person. Currently, these historical sources
4 stole is the acronym of the Italian \STOria LEgislativa della pubblica amministrazione italiana", that means \legislative history of the Italian public administration". can be accessed going to the State Archives of Rome or to libraries that have a copy, but in both cases historians are not supported by information system during their research. Our ontology-based archive intends to handle this historical information providing search features and capabilities such that the user can search over this document collection. In the next section, we give details of the components of the system, while the abstract is concluded in Section 3 by listing the future work planned. 2
In Figure 1 we describe the architecture of stole; looking at the gure, we can
see that it is composed of the modules listed in the following:
Ontology It represents the conceptual layer of our application. It is used to
represent knowledge concerning journals, authors, cited people and events,
as well as the relations between them. The DL expressivity if the stole5
ontology is ALCOIQ(D), and it is composed of 2909 axioms. Actually,
it is comprised of 342 individuals, its population is growing continuously.
It has been developed building on existing standards and meta-data
vocabularies, such as Dublin Core (http://dublincore.org), FOAF (http:
//www.foaf-project.org), Bio Vocabulary (http://vocab.org/bio/0.1)
and the Bibliographic Ontology (http://bibliontology.com). Concerning
the modeling ontology language, our choice falls to OWL2 DL [
Inference Engine This module interacts with Ontology to check its
consistency and to infer new knowledge to present to the user. Actually, we are
using the HermiT reasoner [
Triple Store and SPARQL Endpoint They are the modules devoted to store and query the knowledge base, respectively. For these purposes, we are currently using Open Virtuoso7.
STOLE Application In this module we implemented all functionalities related to query the data to SPARQL Endpoint and to process the answer in order to be presented to the user by means of the GUI.
GUI It is devoted to the user-system interaction and it aims at providing data representations widely used in the historical research eld, such as timelines of historical events. 3
We have presented an ontology-based archive and its application in the historical research domain, which includes numerous key aspects of Semantic Web. The current implementation of this framework can be extended in several ways. First of all, we are designing a Graphical User Interface to support the ontology population stage, in order to make this process of knowledge acquisition more interactive and dynamic. Finally, we are planning to introduce in stole a semantic indexing mechanism using Apache Solr8, in order to extend keyword-based search functionalities.