Modeling contexts in linked archival data (and
                      documents)
                              Francesca Tomasi
                              University of Bologna


Abstract
The recent conceptual model RiC-CM - together with RiC-O, the ontology -
, let us reflect on the notion of contexts, i.e. the different points of view on
archival data, all able to add new information layers. We have to deal, tradi-
tionally, with at least 3 different contexts: the CPF as the creator of archival
records; the provenance of the founds, i.e. the connection between the archive
and the creator; the position of the archival units within a hierarchy. What
we are facing with Linked Open Data is that these 3 contexts are extending
their boundaries, and the finding aids have to be rethought, expecially when we
want to produce scholarly-oriented tools. In the LOD dimension, a new way for
organizing knowledge, we have to focus on some facts: we need to document
different kind of agents, with different roles, functions and involvement in event;
we need to understand that the provenance is important also for assertions, i.e.
it’s related to the idea of authorship of RDF statements, with a source to be de-
clared, a degree of certainty and the expression of a special (even contradictory)
point of view; the tree, i.e. the hierarchy, is a data structure unable to solve
all the modeling need, that are best represented through a graph data model.
These reflections bring a number of considerations on this new way of publish-
ing Archival Data, in an open and linked dimension, i.e. a knowledge graph
of (semantically) enhanced archival resources. A couple of examples, one from
a structured collection, i.e. the catalogue of the Federico Zeri photo archive,
and another from a semi-structured document, i.e. the semantic digital edition
of the notebook written by the italian politician and classical philologist Paolo
Bufalini, gave us the possibility to face some of these issues, trying to suggest
some practices and methods.


Short bio
Francesca Tomasi is associate professor in Archival Science, Bibliography and
Librarianship at the University of Bologna (Italy). Her research is mostly de-
voted to digital humanities, with a special attention to documentary digital
edition, and a focus on knowledge organization methods in archives and li-
braries. She is member of different scientific committees of both associations
and journals. In particular, she is Director of the international second cycle
degree in Digital Humanities and Digital Knowledge (DHDK), and co-head of
the Digital Humanities Advanced Research Center (DH.ARC). She has been
President of the Italian Association of Digital Humanities (AIUCD – Associ-
azione per l’Informatica Umanistica e la Cultura Digitale). She is editor and
scientific director of several digital scholarly environments, in particular: Ves-
pasiano da Bisticci Letters, Zeri&Lode project, Bufalini notebook.She wrote
about 100 papers and 4 monographs related to Digital Humanities topics (a list
of publications in:
    https://www.unibo.it/sitoweb/francesca.tomasi/publications).




                                        2