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We present the SYNTHESIS documentation system and its use in the context of a large European research project of Art History, called RICONTRANS. SYNTHESIS is Web-based, multilingual, and configurable for use in other digital humanities fields. It focuses on semantic interoperability and achieves this by making use of standards for data modelling (CIDOC-CRM). The aim is the production of data with high value, longevity and long-term validity., published and presented at Digital Humanities 2022 (DH2022), July 25-29, 2022. https://dh2022.adho.org/

An increasing number of organisations in almost all fields have started adopting semantic web technologies for publishing their data as open, linked and interoperable (RDF) datasets, queryable through the SPARQL language and protocol. Link traversal has emerged as a SPARQL query processing method that exploits the Linked Data principles and the dynamic nature of the Web to dynamically discover data relevant for answering a query by resolving online resources (URIs) during query evaluation. However, the execution time of link traversal queries can become prohibitively high for certain query types due to the high number of resources that need to be accessed during query execution. In this paper we propose and evaluate baseline methods for estimating the evaluation cost of link traversal queries. Such methods can be very useful for deciding on-the-fly the query execution strategy to follow for a given query, thereby reducing the load of a SPARQL endpoint and increasing the overall reliability of the query service. To evaluate the performance of the proposed methods, we have created (and make publicly available) a ground truth dataset consisting of 2,425 queries.

A vast area of research in historical science concerns the documentation and study of artefacts and related evidence. Current practice mostly uses spreadsheets or simple relational databases to organise the information as rows with multiple columns of related attributes. This form offers itself for data analysis and scholarly interpretation, however it also poses problems including i) the difficulty for collaborative but controlled documentation by a large number of users, ii) the lack of representation of the details from which the documented relations are inferred, iii) the difficulty to extend the underlying data structures as well as to combine and integrate data from multiple and diverse information sources, and iv) the limitation to reuse the data beyond the context of a particular research activity. To support historians to cope with these problems, in this paper we describe the Synthesis documentation system and its use by a large number of historians in the context of an ongoing research project in the field of History of Art. The system is Web-based and collaborative, and makes use of existing standards for information documentation and publication (CIDOC-CRM, RDF), focusing on semantic interoperability and the production of data of high value and long-term validity., Comment: This is a preprint of an article accepted for publication at the 20th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2021)

In this paper we introduce a method for exploiting entities from the emerging Web of Data for enhancing various Information Retrieval (IR) services. The approach is based on named-entity recognition applied in a set of search results, and on a graph of documents and identified entities that is constructed dynamically and analyzed stochastically using a Random Walk method. The result of this analysis is exploited in two different contexts: for automatic query expansion and for re-ranking a set of retrieved results. Evaluation results in the 2015 TREC Clinical Decision Support Track illustrate that query expansion can increase recall by retrieving more relevant hits, while re-ranking can notably improve the ranked list of results by moving relevant but low-ranked hits in higher positions.