Search

The RESTORE project (smaRt accESs TO digital heRitage and mEmory) started in June 2020 with a duration of 2 years. The project consortium, coordinated by the Istituto Opera del Vocabolario Italiano - CNR (National Research Council of Italy), includes the State Archives and the Museum of Palazzo Pretorio in Prato, the Archival and Bibliographic Superintendency of Tuscany as well as the SPACE SpA company. The project - co-financed by the Region of Tuscany - has as its main purpose the recovery, integration and accessibility of data and digital objects produced in the last twenty years by its partners, in order to build a knowledge base with information on the history of the city and of its institutions, on the development of its economic and entrepreneurial system, and on the role of women in the development of a welfare state and network. Starting from the figure of the merchant Francesco di Marco Datini, his family and his entourage, and broadening the focus from the local dimension it will be possible to reconstruct a significant part of the history of European and Mediterranean cities of the 14th century, including commercial and economical aspects. This paper presents a focused overview on the mapping of the archival and museum digital resources provided by the partners (encoded with different standards, such as: EAD, EAC-CPF, TEI, ICCD etc.) to the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model, the ontology chosen within the RESTORE project as the “common language” for semantic data integration. The landscape for the scientific and infrastructural development of the project’s activities consists in the collaboration (via the CNR- OVI) with some key players in the EU RIs environment, such as DARIAH-ERIC (ESFRI Landmark for the Humanities and Social Sciences) and E-RIHS (ESFRI project for the Heritage Science), as well as other actors within the EOSC Framework.

One of the leading motivations behind the multilingual semantic web is to make resources accessible digitally in an online global multilingual context. Consequently, it is fundamental for knowledge bases to find a way to manage multilingualism and thus be equipped with those procedures for its conceptual modelling. In this context, the goal of this paper is to discuss how common-sense knowledge and cultural knowledge are modelled in a multilingual framework. More particularly, multilingualism and conceptual modelling are dealt with from the perspective of FunGramKB, a lexico-conceptual knowledge base for natural language understanding. This project argues for a clear division between the lexical and the conceptual dimensions of knowledge. Moreover, the conceptual layer is organized into three modules, which result from a strong commitment towards capturing semantic knowledge (Ontology), procedural knowledge (Cognicon) and episodic knowledge (Onomasticon). Cultural mismatches are discussed and formally represented at the three conceptual levels of FunGramKB.

This study intends to account for the process involved in the construction of the conceptual meaning of verbs (#EVENTS) directly related to legal aspects of terrorism and organized crime based on the evidence provided by the Globalcrimeterm Corpus and the consistent application of specific criteria for term extraction. The selected 49 concepts have eventually been integrated in the Core Ontology of FunGramKB (Functional Grammar Knowledge Base), a knowledge base which is founded on the principles of deep semantics and is also aimed at the computational development of the Lexical Constructional Model (www.fungramkb.com). To achieve this purpose, key phases of the COHERENT methodology (Periñán Pascual & Mairal Usón 2011) are followed, particularly those which involve the modelling, subsumption and hierarchisation of the aforementioned verbal concepts. The final outcome of this research shows that most of the apparently specialised conceptual units should eventually be included in the Core Ontology instead of the specific Globalcrimeterm Subontology, due to the fact that the semantic content of their corresponding lexical units can be found in widely used learner`s dictionaries and, consequently, this conceptual information is not only shared by the experts in the field but also by the layperson and the average speaker of the language.