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{{Paper
|id=Vol-3144/RP-paper11
|storemode=property
|title=SCIBA - A Prototype of the Computerized Cartographic System of an Archaeological Bibliography
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3144/RP-paper11.pdf
|volume=Vol-3144
|authors=Eleonora Bernasconi,Paolo Boccuccia,Marco Fabbri,Alessia Francescangeli,Roberto Marcucci,Massimo Mecella,Maura Medri,Alberto Morvillo,Marcella Pisani,Emiliano Tondi
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/rcis/BernasconiBFFMM22
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==SCIBA - A Prototype of the Computerized Cartographic System of an Archaeological Bibliography==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3144/RP-paper11.pdf
SCIBA - A Prototype of the Computerized Cartographic
System of an Archaeological Bibliography
Eleonora Bernasconi1, Paolo Boccuccia2, Marco Fabbri3, Alessia Francescangeli4,
Roberto Marcucci4, Massimo Mecella1, Maura Medri5, Alberto Morvillo1,
Marcella Pisani3 and Emiliano Tondi3
1
Sapienza Università di Roma, Department of Computer, Control, and Management Engineering Antonio Ruberti
(DIAG), via Ariosto, 25, 00185 Rome, Italy
2
Museo delle Civiltà, piazza Guglielmo Marconi, 14, 00144 Rome, Italy
3
Roma Tor Vergata, Department of History, Cultural Heritage, Education and Society, Urban Landscape Archeology
Laboratory (ARPAE), via Columbia 1, 00133 Rome, Italy
4
L’Erma di Bretschneider, via Marianna Dionigi, 57, 00193 Rome, Italy
5
Roma Tre, Department of Humanistic Studies, Cultural Heritage Laboratory (Digital Humanities Laboratory), via
Ostiense, 234, 00146 Rome, Italy
Abstract
Archaeological and historical-artistic studies, together with correlated multidisciplinary research, regard-
less of the language of writing or technical terminology, find a natural connection between them in the
topographical positioning. Studying a monument or area from an archaeological and historical-artistic
point of view cannot be separated from a long search for the material published in specialized libraries.
SCIBA aims to drastically reduce search times and provide an instant overview of particular themes
through knowledge extraction from reference texts and the visualization of the concerned cartography.
With a simplified user experience, the user will be able to identify the area, location, archaeological site
or single monument of interest, exactly as already used to do with contemporary navigation systems,
and in addition will be able to view in real-time all the related bibliography and to navigate the key
concepts in a knowledge graph.
Keywords
Knowledge extraction, Digital library, Archaeology,
1. Introduction
The SCIBA (Sistema Cartografico Informatizzato della Bibliografia Archeologica) project envis-
ages the development of an innovative bibliographic search system of an archaeological and
historical digital library on a cartographic basis. The platform, which can then be expanded
on a national and international scale, will focus on the Lazio region (Italy), with the support
Joint Proceedings of RCIS 2022 Workshops and Research Projects Track, May 17-20, 2022, Barcelona, Spain
Envelope-Open bernasconi@diag.uniroma1.it (E. Bernasconi); paolo.boccuccia@beniculturali.it (P. Boccuccia);
fabbri@uniroma2.it (M. Fabbri); alessia.francescangeli@lerma.it (A. Francescangeli); roberto.marcucci@lerma.it
(R. Marcucci); mecella@diag.uniroma1.it (M. Mecella); maura.medri@uniroma3.it (M. Medri);
morvillo@diag.uniroma1.it (A. Morvillo); marcella.pisani@uniroma2.it (M. Pisani); emiliano.tondi@uniroma2.it
(E. Tondi)
Orcid 0000-0003-3142-3084 (E. Bernasconi); 0000-0002-9730-8882 (M. Mecella); 0000-0001-5154-6095 (A. Morvillo)
© 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
CEUR
Workshop
Proceedings
http://ceur-ws.org
ISSN 1613-0073
CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org)
of the “L’Erma di Bretschneider” publishing house, and will allow the visualization of the
existing bibliography concerning some selected topographical elements. It will also be possible
to expand the search to further related themes, automatically extracted from the system based
on the contents and metadata of the integrated bibliographic material. The aim is to develop a
search and comparative semantic analysis tool of great utility for research bodies, museums,
municipalities and subjects interested in knowledge and management of the territory, and, at
the same time, capable of generating an increase in volume sales with direct employment effects
of the publishing chain.
2. Summary of the project
The SCIBA platform is based on the ARCA platform, a visual-search based system that allows the
semantic exploration of a bookstore, and arises from the researchers’ need to explore knowledge
bases in a cartographic context [1, 2, 3]. This is done by searching for links between the different
topics related to a place or a key term, in such a way as to reveal unexpected connections
during the exploration of contents and, thus, generating new ideas. These connections between
concepts are visually represented by means of a graph that the user can arrange on her own,
a solution already used in other projects, such as NOTAE, a tool to investigate the graphic
symbols in order to capture all the possible historical implications [4], which uses a similar
visual-search system to navigate a Knowledge Graph.
The content search will be based on semantics and cartographic visualization. Unlike the
classic search, where the search engine or application, based on keywords, proposes the texts,
documents and metadata in which those words are present as a list of results, the semantic search
has the aim of expanding the results and improve their accuracy by eliminating unnecessary
results such as in the case of homographs or by including conceptually relevant results. To
carry out semantic searches, it is necessary that metadata and texts are “annotated”, that is, that
unique identification codes (actually IRI, Internationalized Resource Identifier) are assigned to
words contained in the texts, regardless of gender/number or, in the case of verbs, the inflected
form and, in some cases, regardless of language. The actual search, then, will not be carried out
on the single words but on the combination of semantic fields (the word, in all the genres and
numbers in which it can be declined, synonyms, derivatives and the other words of the same
semantic field).
Finally, by applying semantic search on a base cartography, it is possible to use a place name
as a search key for a given theme. This is obtained by associating the cartography geometric
and geographical information with the concept of “place” (i.e. a region or a point of interest),
obtained from the reference texts with the use of an external AI. This AI will extract all the
entities, represented by words from the texts, that will then linked by the platform to an external
Knowledge Graph, specifically DBpedia, in such a way as to acquire the main information
contained, included those concerning places. Geographical information of the places of interest
are instead contained in the source maps files (i.e. GeoJSON file format1 ).
Once internal data (entities extracted from PDFs and maps, provided by a manager-role
user) and the external information (DBpedia, linked by the platform) have been obtained, these
1
https://geojson.org/
two will be conveyed by the platform, with the use of a triple store, into a specifically created
Knowledge Graph: the “SCIBA knowledge graph” which can be explored in all its branches.
While the extraction of entities from the data, which is time-consuming, will have to be
in batches, i.e., upstream of the whole process, every time the data sources (PDFs and maps)
increase or undergo changes, the content search will be performed in real time and will have
three different modes:
• Location Search: search by area indicated on a map, displaying all concepts related to it;
• Entity Search: search for a word or a person within the database and extracts all the
relationships that branch off from the main entity being searched;
• Road map: plots the links between the relations of two searched entities (origin and
destination), allowing to ‘navigate’ in the topic of interest for subsequent approximations
and reach other contents and documents on further potentially interesting topics.
The user of the SCIBA platform, having tracked down all the contents of her interest, will be
able to organize them according to her own needs and interests by querying the search engine,
interacting with the expansion and multiplication of the information returned and exploring
the virtual library and the graph.
3. Objectives and Expected Tangible Results
The aim is to create a prototype of the platform based on the sources provided by “L’Erma di
Bretschneider” publishing house2 and the cartographic files of the Lazio Region, which can
be extended, at a later stage, to other editions of international publishers who have published
research carried out in the Region.
The objectives of the project consist mainly in:
• location of the reference territory of the studies published by L’Erma di Bretschneider;
• integration of an automated semantic search system;
• identification and acquisition of possible stakeholders;
• elaboration of dissemination strategies capable of reaching the widest heterogeneity of
markets to identify subjects particularly sensitive to the potential of the product. The
SCIBA project also aims to increase the knowledge of minor archaeological sites, those
which, while registering a low number of visitors, are of great cultural importance.
An essential aspect of the platform concerns its usability by users, with a user experience
aimed at researchers in the field of archaeology and therefore emphasizing the cartographic
aspect and reducing technicalities and mechanisms that could complicate its use.
2
https://www.lerma.it/
Figure 1: SCIBA plaftorm working area mockup. The user can select the places (a region or a point of
interest) on a background map, with a side panel for the semantic search while floating boxes shows the
selected graph’s entities.
4. Current Project Results
The SCIBA project started in October 2021 and is expected to end by April 2023 (18 months). So
far, only User Experience research and platform definition activities have been performed. In
particular:
• User experience and interaction have been defined. It must have a map-oriented inter-
face with simplified interactions, being a platform intended for use by archaeological
researchers.
• The system requirements has been set so they can satisfy the possibility of an on-premise
installation with a virtualized environment.
• The platform structure has been defined. It must allow maintainability of the data sources
by the management staff, so they can keep them updated without technical intervention.
• The geographical place integration in the SCIBA knowledge graph is still under analysis.
The current approach is to use another knowledge graph to link geographical information
to a concept from the generic knowledge graph (see Figure 2).
5. Conclusions
In this paper, we introduced the SCIBA project. The project’s goal is to give a handy tool for
researchers in archaeology that allows them to obtain information quickly, have reference
Figure 2: Current approach for the geographic contextualization of contents in SCIBA. Concepts
extracted from the terms contained in the books are inserted in a knowledge graph, in which they will
be identified through an IRI (Internationalized Resource Identifier). Those concerning a location will be
associated to their respective cartographic data, also identified through an IRI.
cartography, and the possibility of extrapolating and linking concepts from a bibliography. The
project is in an initial phase where only User Experience research and platform definition have
already started.
At the first point, the fruition and management of cartographic files are still under develop-
ment. The platform must allow to load, filter display and navigate the maps. Moreover, how
the concepts extracted from the texts are associated with a geographical place has currently
only been defined and not yet implemented. Each map file must be analyzed indexed, and its
elements must be associated with a concept in the knowledge graph. Another challenge is
to simplify the management of data sources. At present, loading and analyzing the contents
requires complex operations that are difficult to carry out by a non-technician. Finally, the
public website, which will allow the researchers to explore contents and items verified by SCIBA
curators, is currently in the design phase to make it publicly available in 2023.
Acknowledgments
This work has been supported by Regione Lazio and MIUR [Determinazione n. G07413 del
16/06/2021]
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