arXiv subjects

Francesca Mambelli

Publications and source records attributed to Francesca Mambelli.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Many-to-many. Usability challenges of entity reconciliation in art history and photographic studies

This article investigates challenges in reconciling heterogeneous records across cultural institutions, focusing on art historical photo archives within the PHAROS consortium. Through case studies, the study analyses reconciliation workflows and cataloguing traditions, with attention to institutional contexts, data granularities, and modelling strategies. Reconciliation is seldom a one-to-one operation. Ambiguities, incomplete data, shifting attributions, and varying practices shape outcomes. Strategies observed include the creation of anonymous or collective entities, the use of umbrella terms, the addition of uncertainty qualifiers, and reticence when ambiguity cannot be resolved. The article highlights the need to model uncertainty explicitly, offering a framework that connects technical reconciliation methods with institutional practices. Insights from PHAROS provide guidance for designing more robust, interoperable, and sustainable cultural heritage infrastructures.

cs.DL↗

arXiv2022

Exploratory Methods for Relation Discovery in Archival Data

In this article we propose a holistic approach to discover relations in art historical communities and enrich historians' biographies and archival descriptions with graph patterns relevant to art historiographic enquiry. We use exploratory data analysis to detect patterns, we select features, and we use them to evaluate classification models to predict new relations, to be recommended to archivists during the cataloguing phase. Results show that relations based on biographical information can be addressed with higher precision than relations based on research topics or institutional relations. Deterministic and a priori rules present better results than probabilistic methods.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2017

Enhancing semantic expressivity in the cultural heritage domain: exposing the Zeri Photo Archive as Linked Open Data

Describing cultural heritage objects from the perspective of Linked Open Data (LOD) is not a trivial task. The process often requires not only choosing pertinent ontologies, but also developing new models that preserve the most information and express the semantic power of cultural heritage data. Indeed, data managed in archives, libraries and museums are complex objects themselves, which require a deep reflection on even non-conventional conceptual models. Starting from these considerations, this paper describes a research project: to expose the vastness of one of the most important collections of European cultural heritage, the Zeri Photo Archive, as Linked Open Data. We describe here the steps we undertook to this end: firstly, we developed two ad hoc ontologies for describing all the issues not completely covered by existent models (the F Entry and the OA Entry Ontology); then we mapped into RDF the descriptive elements used in the current Zeri Photo Archive catalog, converting into CIDOC-CRM and into the two new aforementioned models the source data based on the Italian content standards Scheda F (Photography Entry, in English) and Scheda OA (Work of Art Entry, in English); and finally, we created an RDF dataset of the output of the mapping that could show a result capable of demonstrating the complexity of our scenario.

cs.DL↗