Several digital libraries and archives are emerging around the world due to the need to store, organize and make available on the Web a lot of resource collections. However, managing this information poses new challenges in order to overcome traditional data management and information browsing. Semantic Web technologies can improve digital libraries and archives by facilitating metadata storage and adding semantic capabilities, which increase the quality of the information retrieval process. In this paper we present arkivo, an ontology designed to model the archival description of historical document collections.
The Web changed the way people can search and discover information
providing them the opportunity to have direct access to millions of documents easily.
Online repositories, such as digital libraries, support users' exploration of large
document collections and, as in the case of digital historical archives, also
facilitate access to original and rare documents. Recently, digital archives are facing
new challenges in order to overcome traditional data management and
information browsing. The Semantic Web (SW) [
In the context of digital libraries and archives, some of the most used
metadata and ontologies include Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) [
To address these needs, in this paper we introduce arkivo1, an ontology
designed to accommodate the description of historical archival documents,
support1 Arkivo is the translation of \Archive" in Esperanto.
ing archive workers by encompassing both the hierarchical structure of archival
collections and rich metadata created during archive digitization, such as
historical elements. The aim of arkivo is not only to provide a reference schema
for publishing Linked Data [
The paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we brie y the arkivo ontology and its design process, while in Section 3 we show the usage of arkivo in the context of the digitized collections of the Jozef Pilsudski Institute of America. We conclude the paper in Section 4 with some nal remarks and future work. 2
The ontology development process can be characterized by di erent strategies
and methodologies { see, e.g., [
Requirements Speci cation and Knowledge Acquisition. In this phase, we considered di erent scenarios, use-cases and end-users, focusing on the archival management practices and the most common methods used by archives for storing and cataloging materials. Moreover, we analyzed the best practices used by archive workers in the metadata collection process. This phase allowed us to detect the main concepts useful to represent the domain of interest. Conceptualization and Formalization. In the light of the knowledge gained in the previous phase, we have drawn up a glossary of terms that identify the proper terminology used in the archival domain. The aim of the conceptualization resulting from this activity was intended to structure the domain knowledge, in terms of concepts and relations, in order to meet the pre-established requirements. In particular, we compute a taxonomy for describing the archival arrangement levels, from the concept of collection, which can contain items or other collections as fonds, to the concept of single item, which typically is the smallest indivisible unit.
Integration. Some of the concepts resulting from the conceptualization phase
can be represented by reusing existing standard metadata and vocabularies. For
this purpose, we integrated arkivo with the several core ontologies and
vocabularies. In details, DCMI, FOAF2, and schema.org [
Implementation. arkivo has been developed using the OWL2 language [
This class has several sub-classes, including :File and :Fonds. The former is the class devoted to describe a le, namely an organized unit of items grouped together, while the latter relates the whole of the records organically created and/or accumulated by a particular person, family, or corporate body in the course of that creator's activities and functions. :Date is the class containing dates mentioned in an item. foaf:Organization is used to describe an organization related to bibliographic items or to events. foaf:Person represents people related to a bibliographic item or to a speci c event. :Item represents the archival item, in other words the smallest intellectually indivisible archival unit. This class contains several sub-classes, such as bibo:Article, :Document and bibo:Letter. dct:creator is the relationship that shows who has created a speci c item, connecting individuals in :Item class to individuals in foaf:Agent class. dc:created indicates the date when it was created an individual of the class
Item. schema:isPartOf indicates that an individual in the class :Item is part of a collection, by linking that individual to another in the class bibo:Collection. schema:mentions is useful to indicate that an instance of foaf:Person and/or schema:Place is mentioned in an individual of the class bibo:Collection. :isSectionOf connects instances of :File to instances of :Fonds. :repository connects instances of foaf:Organization class to instances of bibo:Collection class, in order to describe that an organization can be a repository of collections or items. arkivo ontology is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License and it can be downloaded at http://purl.org/arkivo. For more details about the full list of classes and properties see also the documentation at https://github.com/ArkivoTeam/ARKIVO.
The Jozef Pilsudski Institute of America5 was established in 1943 in New York City for the purpose of continuing the work of the Institute for Research of Modern History of Poland established in Warsaw in 1923. The Polish State was re-established in 1918 in the aftermath of the Great War and after several regional wars and uprisings, the borders were settled in 1922. Soon after a group of historians and o cers begun to travel around the country to collect archival documentation. At the beginning of World War II, part of the archives were evacuated and landed in Washington, eventually creating the seed of the Institute archival collections, which grew in time by donations from politicians, o cers and organizations of prewar Poland and Polish diaspora. Today, the Institute has some 240 linear meters, namely 2 million pages, of archives covering mostly the Polish, European and American history of late 19th and 20th century. The collection includes documents, photographs, lms, posters, periodicals, books, personal memoirs of diplomats, and political and military leaders, as well as collection of paintings by Polish and European masters. For the last nine years, the archival collections are being digitized, and gradually put online.
The main objective of the historical research is to understand the past through the study of historical sources, such as documents stored in archives. In this context, researches are mainly interested in detecting facts (e.g., people, places, events) cited in the documents in order to analyze them, discover relationships and draw inferences. arkivo ontology, unlike, e.g., EAD, provides elements to represent both the hierarchical structure of archival documents and the historical data expressed in them.
As an example, in the following we report the description (in Turtle language) of one of the document stored in the Jozef Pilsudski Institute archive, namely the \Letter to comrades in London". Such document has been wrote by Pilsudski in 1898, and it contains a mention of di erent people and places, as depicted in Figure 1. :LetterToComradesInLondon a bibo:Letter . :A701.001.012 a :File . :A701.001 a :Fonds . :PilsudskiInstitute a foaf:Organization . :PilsudskiJosef a foaf:Person . :JedrzejowskiBoleslaw a foaf:Person . :MalinowskiAleksander a foaf:Person . :Sachalin a schema:Place . :Bialystok a schema:Place . :LetterToComradesInLondon schema:isPartOf :A701.001.012 . :A701.001.012 schema:isSectionOf :A701.001 . :A701.001 :repository :PilsudskiInstitute . :LetterToComradesInLondon dc:creator :PilsudskiJosef .
:LetterToComradesInLondon schema:mentions :JedrzejowskiBoleslaw . :LetterToComradesInLondon schema:mentions :MalinowskiAleksander . :LetterToComradesInLondon schema:mentions :Sachalin . :LetterToComradesInLondon schema:mentions :Bialystok .
Finally we report that, actually, in the version of arkivo used for the Jozef Pilsudski archival collections are stored about 270,000 triples, and it is populated by more than 130,000 individuals. In detail, there are 13,326 individuals related to items, 15,678 titles, 6,458 authors, 29,280 persons mentioned, 47,185 places, and 28,039 dates. 4
In this paper we brie y presented arkivo, an ontology designed to model the archival description of historical document collections. In the paper we also show the current usage of arkivo in the context of the historical archive of the Jozef Pilsudski Institute of America. Currently, we are working on the realization of an ontology-based digital archive.
Future work will include the implementation of automated and adaptive
ontology population processes exploiting the techniques presented in [