=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1608/paper-01
|storemode=property
|title=Preface
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1608/paper-01.pdf
|volume=Vol-1608
}}
==Preface==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1608/paper-01.pdf
Preface
This volume of proceedings gathers papers from the 1st Workshop on Hu-
manities in the Semantic Web (WHiSe 2016), which was held on May 29, 2016
during the 13th ESWC Conference in Anissaras, Crete, Greece.
The decision to hold this workshop was a result of reflecting on the extent
to which the Semantic Web community - through its vision, its technological
offer and the large volumes of data it generates - has been serving the needs
of historians, philologists, cultural critics, musicologists and other humanists.
Prior efforts undertaken by the Semantic Web community to establish a com-
munication channel with scholars in the Humanities had concentrated primarily
on digital libraries and thesauri. While this has promoted the emergence of
large semantically-structured digital collections and conceptual models such as
CIDOC-CRM, EDM and FRBRoo, they left open questions as to how to aid the
research of humanists who cannot rely on structured data generated en masse,
unlike those whose use cases pass through social networks or large online media
platforms. Is the race for Big Data mining cutting off these scholarly categories?
Are there research challenges of interest that humanists will not pursue due to
an opaque perception of what Linked Data is? What problems do Humanities
users have in interacting with Semantic Web content and applications? And how
can they help Semantic Web researchers support new modes of enquiry?
A response to such questions came from research groups primarily comprised
of humanists with a focus on making their data structured and machine-readable.
The fields of Classics, History and Archaeology have seen the emergence of a
nascent Linked Pasts community that advocates an ‘ecological’ approach to few
but widely-deployed ontologies to enhance discovery and visualisation. Similarly,
the Musicology field is promoting Linked Data adoption through research net-
works such as Transforming Musicology. This prompted the organisers of this
workshop to investigate avenues for promoting a dialogue between the two com-
munities on equal terms, with each community serving both as investigators on
research problems, and as providers of insights and solutions.
In this spirit, WHiSe was conceived so as to accommodate the modus operandi
of each community on several fronts. The workshop included presentations of
peer-reviewed papers - in the Computer Science style, as it were - and round-table
discussions on central themes and novel research problems - in the Humanities
style. Likewise, the program committee for peer reviews was equally balanced
with acknowledged scholars from both communities. The topics of the papers
presented, and included in this proceedings volume, spanned from use cases
localised in specific regions implementing digital libraries, gazetteers and the like,
to emergent ecosystems and research networks dealing with the preservation of
entire histories of data. Round-table discussions encompassed research problems
relating to data capture, especially dealing with vague or fragmentary sources,
as well as re-thinking the ecologies of Linked Data for the Humanities in terms
of what can guarantee their evolution and what risks holding them back.
2 A. Adamou, E. Daga and L. Isaksen (eds.)
This first edition of WHiSe received twelve submissions; ten of these are
presented in this volume, equally distributed between full papers of mature and
validated research and short papers of early research, positions and accounts of
community activation.
The editors would like to thank all the authors for their insightful contribu-
tions to WHiSe. Thanks are also due to the members of the program committee,
for ensuring a quality standard of the workshop program through their reviews,
and to the organisers of the ESWC 2016 conference for the chance and their
continued support with setting up the workshop.
Organising committee
Alessandro Adamou, Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, UK
Enrico Daga, Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, UK
Leif Isaksen, Department of History, Lancaster University, UK
Program committee
Carlo Allocca, The Open University
Elton Barker, The Open University
Francesca Benatti, The Open University
Gabriel Bodard, King’s College
Kai-Christian Bruhn, mainzed
Benjamin Fields, Goldsmiths University of London
Nick Gibbins, University of Southampton
Asunción Gómez-Pérez, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
Elena González-Blanco, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia
Jorge Gracia, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
Ethan Gruber, American Numismatic Society
Eero Hyvönen, Aalto University
Rinke Hoekstra, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Laura Hollink, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica
Lorna Hughes, University of Glasgow
Antoine Isaac, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Angeliki Lymberopoulou, The Open University
Elena Montiel, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
Paul Mulholland, The Open University
Dominic Oldman, British Museum
Kevin R. Page, University of Oxford
Silvio Peroni, Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna
Mia Ridge, The British Library
Rainer Simon, Austrian Institute of Technology
Ilaria Tiddi, The Open University
Daniel Vila-Suero, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid