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Marilena Daquino

Publications and source records attributed to Marilena Daquino.

12 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↗
arXiv2024

Thinking Outside the Black Box: Insights from a Digital Exhibition in the Humanities

One of the main goals of Open Science is to make research more reproducible. There is no consensus, however, on what exactly "reproducibility" is, as opposed for example to "replicability", and how it applies to different research fields. After a short review of the literature on reproducibility/replicability with a focus on the humanities, we describe how the creation of the digital twin of the temporary exhibition "The Other Renaissance" has been documented throughout, with different methods, but with constant attention to research transparency, openness and accountability. A careful documentation of the study design, data collection and analysis techniques helps reflect and make all possible influencing factors explicit, and is a fundamental tool for reliability and rigour and for opening the "black box" of research.

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

Melody: A Platform for Linked Open Data Visualisation and Curated Storytelling

Data visualisation and storytelling techniques help experts highlight relations between data and share complex information with a broad audience. However, existing solutions targeted to Linked Open Data visualisation have several restrictions and lack the narrative element. In this article we present MELODY, a web interface for authoring data stories based on Linked Open Data. MELODY has been designed using a novel methodology that harmonises existing Ontology Design and User Experience methodologies (eXtreme Design and Design Thinking), and provides reusable User Interface components to create and publish web-ready article-alike documents based on data retrievable from any SPARQL endpoint. We evaluate the software by comparing it with existing solutions, and we show its potential impact in projects where data dissemination is crucial.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2023

From ontology design to user-centred interfaces for music heritage

In this article we investigate the bridge between ontology design and UI/UX design methodologies to assist designers in prototyping web applications for information seeking purposes. We briefly review the state of the art in ontology design and UI/UX methodologies, then we illustrate our approach applied to a case study in the music heritage domain.

cs.HC↗
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↗
arXiv2021

Creating RESTful APIs over SPARQL endpoints using RAMOSE

Semantic Web technologies are widely used for storing RDF data and making them available on the Web through SPARQL endpoints, queryable using the SPARQL query language. While the use of SPARQL endpoints is strongly supported by Semantic Web experts, it hinders broader use of RDF data by common Web users, engineers and developers unfamiliar with Semantic Web technologies, who normally rely on Web RESTful APIs for querying Web-available data and creating applications over them. To solve this problem, we have developed RAMOSE, a generic tool developed in Python to create REST APIs over SPARQL endpoints. Through the creation of source-specific textual configuration files, RAMOSE enables the querying of SPARQL endpoints via simple Web RESTful API calls that return either JSON or CSV-formatted data, thus hiding all the intrinsic complexities of SPARQL and RDF from common Web users. We provide evidence that the use of RAMOSE to provide REST API access to RDF data within OpenCitations triplestores is beneficial in terms of the number of queries made by external users to such RDF data using the RAMOSE API compared with the direct access via the SPARQL endpoint. Our findings show the importance for suppliers of RDF data of having an alternative API access service, which enables its use by those with no (or little) experience in Semantic Web technologies and the SPARQL query language. RAMOSE can be used both to query any SPARQL endpoint and to query any other Web API, and thus it represents an easy generic technical solution for service providers who wish to create an API service to access Linked Data stored as RDF in a conventional triplestore.

cs.DB↗
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↗
arXiv2020

The OpenCitations Data Model

A variety of schemas and ontologies are currently used for the machine-readable description of bibliographic entities and citations. This diversity, and the reuse of the same ontology terms with different nuances, generates inconsistencies in data. Adoption of a single data model would facilitate data integration tasks regardless of the data supplier or context application. In this paper we present the OpenCitations Data Model (OCDM), a generic data model for describing bibliographic entities and citations, developed using Semantic Web technologies. We also evaluate the effective reusability of OCDM according to ontology evaluation practices, mention existing users of OCDM, and discuss the use and impact of OCDM in the wider open science community.

cs.DL↗
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↗