An Ontology-Based Archive for Historical Research

The digitalization of cultural materials is doubtless a key-enabler for increasing accessibility of cultural heritage documents, e.g., historical texts. In the last decade Semantic Digital Libraries (see, e.g., [1]) have attracted the attention of research communities coming from different research areas, such as Cultural Heritage, History, and Knowledge Engineering. In order to find more innovative methods to improve search and retrieval operations, recently portals and digital libraries concerning Cultural Heritage have been enhanced with Semantic Web [2] technologies. Such technologies can offer effective solutions about design and implementation of user-friendly ways to access and query content and metadata [1]. In this context, a prominent example is the Europeana project [3]. Particularly, cultural heritage documents are characterized by being syntactically and semantically heterogeneous, multilingual, semantically rich, and highly interlinked. They are produced in a distributed, open fashion by organizations like museums, libraries, and archives, using their own established standards and best practices [4]. Historical documents represent an important component of the cultural heritage field, and they have been digitized and published on the web by means of several applications. In this extended abstract we present stole, an ontology-based digital archive collecting some of the most relevant journal articles published between 1848 and 1946 concerning the legislative history of public administration in Italy. In stole we leverage ontologies for describing domain knowledge and providing semantic information integration among data in order to support historians’ research. The documents stored in stole are regarded as a valuable source of information for historical research since through the study of these texts it is possible to trace the course of Italian history and often to find out some unexplored but useful aspects about a particular event or person. Currently, these historical sources