arXiv subjects

Francesca Tomasi

Publications and source records attributed to Francesca Tomasi.

10 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2024

KwicKwocKwac, a tool for rapidly generating concordances and marking up a literary text

This paper introduces KwicKwocKwac 1.0 (KwicKK), a web application designed to enhance the annotation and enrichment of digital texts in the humanities. KwicKK provides a user-friendly interface that enables scholars and researchers to perform semi-automatic markup of textual documents, facilitating the identification of relevant entities such as people, organizations, and locations. Key functionalities include the visualization of annotated texts using KeyWord in Context (KWIC), KeyWord Out Of Context (KWOC), and KeyWord After Context (KWAC) methodologies, alongside automatic disambiguation of generic references and integration with Wikidata for Linked Open Data connections. The application supports metadata input and offers multiple download formats, promoting accessibility and ease of use. Developed primarily for the National Edition of Aldo Moro's works, KwicKK aims to lower the technical barriers for users while fostering deeper engagement with digital scholarly resources. The architecture leverages contemporary web technologies, ensuring scalability and reliability. Future developments will explore user experience enhancements, collaborative features, and integration of additional data sources.

cs.DL↗

arXiv2024

Structuring Authenticity Assessments on Historical Documents using LLMs

Given the wide use of forgery throughout history, scholars have and are continuously engaged in assessing the authenticity of historical documents. However, online catalogues merely offer descriptive metadata for these documents, relegating discussions about their authenticity to free-text formats, making it difficult to study these assessments at scale. This study explores the generation of structured data about documents' authenticity assessment from natural language texts. Our pipeline exploits Large Language Models (LLMs) to select, extract and classify relevant claims about the topic without the need for training, and Semantic Web technologies to structure and type-validate the LLM's results. The final output is a catalogue of documents whose authenticity has been debated, along with scholars' opinions on their authenticity. This process can serve as a valuable resource for integration into catalogues, allowing room for more intricate queries and analyses on the evolution of these debates over centuries.

cs.DL↗

arXiv2024

Linked open data per la valorizzazione di collezioni culturali: il dataset mythLOD

The formal representation of cultural metadata has always been a challenge, considering both the heterogeneity of cultural objects and the need to document the interpretive act exercised by experts. This article provides an overview of the revalorization of the digital collection Mythologiae in Linked Open Data format. The research aims to explore the data of a collection of artworks (Mythologiae) by promoting the potential of the Semantic Web, focusing particularly on the formal representation of the association of cultural objects with literary sources, as realized by experts, also documenting their interpretations. The workflow consisted of defining the data model, cleaning and disambiguating the data, converting it (from tabular structure to graph), and conducting testing activities (particularly expert domain review of the dataset through competency questions and data visualizations). The result is the mythLOD platform, which presents the dataset and detailed research documentation. Additionally, the platform hosts two data visualization spaces (the online catalogue and a data storytelling experiment on the case study of the Aeneid) that enrich the project documentation as user-friendly test units for the dataset and constitute an additional project documentation tool and exploration of the collection.

cs.DL↗

arXiv2023

Saving temporary exhibitions in virtual environments: the Digital Renaissance of Ulisse Aldrovandi -- acquisition and digitisation of cultural heritage objects

As per the objectives of Project CHANGES, particularly its thematic sub-project on the use of virtual technologies for museums and art collections, our goal was to obtain a digital twin of the temporary exhibition on Ulisse Aldrovandi called "The Other Renaissance", and make it accessible to users online. After a preliminary study of the exhibition, focussing on acquisition constraints and related solutions, we proceeded with the digital twin creation by acquiring, processing, modelling, optimising, exporting, and metadating the exhibition. We made hybrid use of two acquisition techniques to create new digital cultural heritage objects and environments, and we used open technologies, formats, and protocols to make available the final digital product. Here, we describe the process of collecting and curating bibliographical exhibition (meta)data and the beginning of the digital twin creation to foster its findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability. The creation of the digital twin is currently ongoing.

cs.GR↗

arXiv2023

Representing provenance and track changes of cultural heritage metadata in RDF: a survey of existing approaches

In the realm of Digital Humanities, the management of cultural heritage metadata is pivotal for ensuring data trustworthiness. Provenance information - contextual metadata detailing the origin and history of data - plays a crucial role in this process. However, tracking provenance and changes in metadata using the Resource Description Framework (RDF) presents significant challenges due to the limitations of foundational Semantic Web technologies. This article offers a comprehensive review of existing models and approaches for representing provenance and tracking changes in RDF, with a specific focus on cultural heritage metadata. It examines W3C standard proposals such as RDF Reification and n-ary relations, along with various alternative systems. Through an in-depth analysis, the study identifies Named Graphs, RDF*, the Provenance Ontology (PROV-O), Dublin Core (DC), Conjectural Graphs, and the OpenCitations Data Model (OCDM) as the most effective solutions. These models are evaluated based on their compliance with RDF standards, scalability, and applicability across different domains. The findings underscore the importance of selecting the appropriate model to ensure robust and reliable management of provenance in RDF datasets, thereby contributing to the ongoing discourse on provenance representation in the Digital Humanities.

cs.DL↗

arXiv2022

Approaching Digital Humanities at the University: a Cultural Challenge

The University of Bologna has a long tradition in Digital Humanities, both at the level of research and teaching. In this article, we want to introduce some experiences in developing new educational models based on the idea of transversal learning, collaborative approaches and projects-oriented outputs, together with the definition of research fields within this vast domain, accompanied by practical examples. The creation of an international master's degree (DHDK), a PhD (CHeDE) and a research centre (/DH.arc) are the results of refining our notion of Digital Humanities in a new bidirectional way: to reflect on computational methodologies and models in the cultural sphere and to suggest a cultural approach to Informatics.

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↗

arXiv2022

CLEF. A Linked Open Data native system for Crowdsourcing

Collaborative data collection initiatives are increasingly becoming pivotal to cultural institutions and scholars, to boost the population of born-digital archives. For over a decade, organisations have been leveraging Semantic Web technologies to design their workflows, ensure data quality, and a means for sharing and reusing (Linked Data). Crucially, scholarly projects that leverage cultural heritage data to collaboratively develop new resources would benefit from agile solutions to simplify the Linked Data production workflow via user-friendly interfaces. To date, only a few pioneers have abandoned legacy cataloguing and archiving systems to fully embrace the Linked Open Data (LOD) paradigm and manage their catalogues or research products through LOD-native management systems. In this article we present Crowdsourcing Linked Entities via web Form (CLEF), an agile LOD-native platform for collaborative data collection, peer-review, and publication. We detail design choices as motivated by two case studies, from the Cultural Heritage and scholarly domains respectively, and we discuss benefits of our solution in the light of prior works. In particular, the strong focus on user-friendly interfaces for producing FAIR data, the provenance-aware editorial process, and the integration with consolidated data management workflows, distinguish CLEF as a novel attempt to develop Linked Data platforms for cultural heritage.

cs.DL↗

arXiv2020

The Landscape of Ontology Reuse Approaches

Ontology reuse aims to foster interoperability and facilitate knowledge reuse. Several approaches are typically evaluated by ontology engineers when bootstrapping a new project. However, current practices are often motivated by subjective, case-by-case decisions, which hamper the definition of a recommended behaviour. In this chapter we argue that to date there are no effective solutions for supporting developers' decision-making process when deciding on an ontology reuse strategy. The objective is twofold: (i) to survey current approaches to ontology reuse, presenting motivations, strategies, benefits and limits, and (ii) to analyse two representative approaches and discuss their merits.

cs.AI↗

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↗