Smart Access to Historical Archives based on Rich Semantic Metadata
Matteo Caserio, Anna Goy, Diego Magro · 2017
Documentary heritage about social and political history of the 20th Century could be an important support for citizens awareness, provided that it is not endangered by the lack of effective access and management tools.In this paper we present a work that is part of the Harlock'900 project and aims at showing how a rich semantic representation, based on ontologies and Semantic Web standards, can enable an innovative and user-friendly access to resources stored in historical archives.In particular, we present a web application enabling users to explore events, places and people mentioned in archival resources.The application relies on a semantic layer including a computational ontology and a RDF triplestore, and provides a User Interface that supports the navigation through highly interconnected data, offering different possible exploration paths.We also report the encouraging feedback obtained by a preliminary evaluation based on a domain expert walkthrough the app.