Cultural Heritage and the Semantic Web

Online cultural archives represent vast amounts of interesting and useful information. During the last decades huge amounts of literature works have been scanned to provide better access to Humanities researchers and teachers. Was the problem 20 years ago one of scarceness of information (precious originals only to consult in major libraries), today’s problem is that of information overload: many databases online and many CD collections are available; each with their own search forms and attributes. This makes it cumbersome for users to find relevant information. In this paper, we describe a case study of how Semantic Web Technologies can be used to disclose cultural heritage information in a scalable way. We present an ontology of Humanities, a semi-automatic tool for annotation, and an application to exploit the annotated content. This tool, positioned somewhere in the middle, between a basic editor and a fully automatic wrapper, helps annotators performing heavy knowledge acquisition tasks in a more efficient and secure way.