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arXiv · 2607.22348

Ask the Curator: Demonstrating Expert-Driven RDF Data Curation with HERITRACE

Arcangelo Massari·Silvio Peroni
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Abstract

HERITRACE is an open-source Web application for curating RDF data held in triplestores, with provenance and change tracking recorded in RDF as well. It is agnostic to the data model: a technician configures it for a collection by writing SHACL shapes and YAML display rules, after which domain experts edit the data through generated forms, and every change becomes a provenance snapshot that can be inspected and restored. This paper traces the path from configuration to curation on a documented case of bibliographic ambiguity: two unrelated articles that PubMed records under the same DOI. We show how a technician prepares a small OpenCitations Meta subset for curation and how a curator acts on duplicate suggestions to merge two articles, inadvertently confirms a further merge despite conflicting metadata, reverts the mistake through the Time Machine, and corrects the DOI after verification against Crossref.

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Arcangelo Massari, Silvio Peroni. 2026-07-24. Ask the Curator: Demonstrating Expert-Driven RDF Data Curation with HERITRACE. https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.22348

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