This volume of proceedings collects the papers presented at the 3rd Workshop on Humanities in the Semantic Web (WHiSe 2020), which was held online on June 2, 2020 during the 17th ESWC Semantic Web Conference.
The recent advances in arti cial intelligence are determining dramatic changes in the way humanities, arts and social sciences perceive the potential for computer science to support their research. The industrial push towards knowledge graphs on one hand, and the emergence of a ordable techniques and o -the-shelf models for machine learning and natural language processing on the other, have transformed the `digital' element from a passive and static publication platform into an active and intelligent actor. The Humanities have a potential to play a key role in this conjuncture: through their approach to knowledge, requiring rich and exible data modelling, digital humanists can be instrumental in informing automated learning processes to keep the quality of their output models to a high standard. In the editors' view, the standards and technologies born and evolving around the Semantic Web, such as the Resource Description Framework (RDF), the SPARQL graph query language, the Web Ontology Language (OWL), and recent evolutions such as Linked Data Fragments, SHACL and RDF*, remain pivotal to such synergy. The rise of dedicated Digital Humanities tracks in several Big Data, Linguistics and Knowledge Management conferences further celebrate this eld as a contributor of challenging problems, novel research questions, original methodologies and critical thinking, rather than merely as an application domain. Consequently, the importance of a workshop series across the relevant communities is also attested to by the creation of a WHiSe steering committee, which will drive its future organisation to broader outreach.
WHiSe 2020 returned in co-location with ESWC, where it originally debuted in 2016. It was also the rst edition to be hosted and attended entirely remotely, at a time where the global COVID-19 predicament urged for a revision of the ways for scienti c communities to share their advances in social contexts. WHiSe 2020 opted for live presentations of the contributors' work, delivered through the video lecturing platform o ered by ESWC. It was also the rst edition to feature a keynote talk, \Europeana as a Linked Data (Quality) case" by Antoine Isaac of the Europeana Foundation, who also delivered it live and to great acclaim.
Alongside introducing keynote talks and reinstating (virtual) round-table discussions from the rst edition, WHiSe continued its focus on the presentation of novel work, with eight accepted peer-reviewed papers presented across three sessions and equally split into full and short papers. In the paper topics, alongside mainstay contributions in digital libraries and cultural heritage, we observed the aforementioned rising interest in linguistics and in classical languages, but also a peculiar insight into civic and social aspects, even involving citizen science.
The editors would like to thank all the authors for the continued delivery of high-quality contributions in times of dramatic change, as well as keynote speaker Antoine Isaac for delivering his contribution above and beyond the call of duty. Thanks are also due to the members of the program committee for playing their part in the quality standard of WHiSe papers. Finally, endless gratitude goes to the organisers of the ESWC conference for their renewed support to WHiSe, especially through necessarily urgent transformations, and for providing a platform that ensured a smooth technical development of the workshop day.
Alessandro Adamou, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland Enrico Daga, The Open University, UK Albert Meron~o-Pen~uela, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Marieke van Erp, KNAW Humanities Cluster, The Netherlands Leif Isaksen, University of Exeter, UK
Alessio Antonini, The Open University Daniel Bangert, Gottingen State and University Library Elton Barker, The Open University Francesca Benatti, The Open University Gabriel Bodard, School of Advanced Study, University of London Victor de Boer, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Rossana Damiano, University of Turin Marilena Daquino, Alma Mater Studiorum Universita di Bologna Tim Duguid, University of Glasgow Ethan Gruber, American Numismatic Society Eero Hyvonen, Aalto University Antoine Isaac, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Francesco Mambrini, Universita Cattolica John McCrae, National University of Ireland, Galway Paul Mulholland, The Open University Patricia Murrieta-Flores, University of Lancaster Kevin R. Page, University of Oxford Silvio Peroni, Alma Mater Studiorum Universita di Bologna Davide Picca, University of Lausanne Robert Sanderson, J. Paul Getty Trust Rainer Simon, Austrian Institute of Technology Francesca Tomasi, Alma Mater Studiorum Universita di Bologna Francois Vignale, Universite du Maine