PhD Activities
During my PhD course in Information Engineering I have been involved in two projects:
1) The first is the “Towards a Digital Dante Encyclopedia” project (2013-2016), an Italian National Research project that aims at building a digital library endowed with services supporting scholars in creating, evolving and consulting a digital encyclopedia of the works of Dante Alighieri, the major Italian poet of the late Middle Ages. In particular, my work has regarded the support to scholars in formally expressing and accessing the knowledge about Dante’s primary sources, i.e. the works of other authors that Dante cites in his texts. The results of this project has been the development of DanteSources (http://www.dantesources.org), a Web application that grants free access to the knowledge about Dante Alighieri’s primary sources. The motivation for my research is that this knowledge is currently contained in many paper books, which makes it difficult for the scholar to retrieve these data and to produce a complete overview. My research addressed the development of an ontology that provides the terms to represent this knowledge. The results are an RDF/S ontology and a semi-automatic tool, which helps scholars to populate the ontology with the data included in authoritative paper commentaries to Dante’s works. This tool automatically saves the resulting RDF graph into a triple store. On top of this graph, DanteSources allows users to extract and display the information stored in the knowledge base in the form of charts and tables. In order to evaluate the usability of DanteSources, I have managed a survey to collect suggestions from end-users interactions with the Web application. An outcome of the whole project has been a methodology and tools that are usable and efficient to represent Dante’s primary sources, which are also applicable to other authors of the Italian and international literature.
DanteSources results to which I contributed are reported in the following:
DanteSources was the winner of the Digital Humanities Awards 2015 in the category “Best DH Tool or Suite of Tools”: http://dhawards.org/dhawards2015/results/
Link to DanteSources has been inserted in the «External links» Section of the Dante
Alighieri’s page on Wikipedia (English and Italian pages):
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dante_Alighieri
DanteSources has been disseminated through a video of the CNR Web TV:
http://www.cnrweb.tv/dantesources/ (Italian language)
DanteSources has been mentioned in the video of the “Raccontare la Ricerca” project, promoted by the University of Pisa: http://video.gelocal.it/iltirreno/locale/la-pisa-di-dante-e-l-orrenda-morte-del-conte-ugolino/48438/49618?ref=search (Italian language)
DanteSources has been used as support to two master theses:
Mussati, V. Le fonti della Vita Nuova. Trattamento informatico e formazione della "biblioteca di Dante". Tesi di laurea in Lettere, Università degli studi di Pisa, 2013/2014.
Gibert, Z. Jenseitsvisionen im islamischen Orient und christlichen Okzident: Jenseitreisen im Islam und Dantes Göttliche Komödie im Vergleich, Tesi di laurea in Lingue, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, 2014/2015
DanteSource has been cited in the article “Trecenteschi nella Rete” edited by Professor
Mirko Tavosanis on the authorative Web site Treccani.it:
http://www.treccani.it/lingua_italiana/speciali/Patota/Tavosanis.html (Italian language) 2) The second project is the Parthenos European project (http://www.parthenos-project.eu/). In this context I have researched and developed an ontology for narratives. The motivation for this research is one of the main issues with current Digital Libraries (DLs), i.e. the limitation of the informative services offered by DLs to answer to users’ queries. In particular, DLs usually provide
simple search functionalities that return a ranked list of their resources. No semantic relations among the returned resources is usually reported that could help users to obtain a more complete knowledge on the subject of their queries. The introduction of the Semantic Web, and in particular of the Linked Data, has the potential to improve the search functionalities of DLs. In this context, my aim has been to introduce narratives as new first-class search functionality of DLs. As output of a query, this envisaged new search functionality should not only return a list of objects but it should also produce one or more narratives. These are composed of events that are linked to the objects of existing DLs (e.g. Europeana) and are endowed with a set of semantic relations connecting these events into a meaningful semantic network. As a necessary step towards this direction, my PhD thesis has presented the development of an ontology for representing narratives that extends an ISO standard, the CIDOC CRM ontology, along with a tool for the construction and the visualization of narratives based on this ontology. Moreover, I have used the tool for evaluating the ontology in the context of an experiment centered on the biography of the Italian poet Dante Alighieri. This evaluation has highlighted that the developed ontology has abstracted the principal common levels of the structures of narrative, reusing classes and properties of the CRM standard ontology to represent them. Furthermore, the evaluation has also highlighted the usefulness of the developed tools.
The list of the papers I have published in the context of my PhD work is reported at the beginning of the thesis.
Other research activities I have been involved in:
09/2016 Reviewer for the International Conference on Digital Humanities 2017,
https://dh2017.adho.org/
09/2016 Member of the Program Committee of the Italian Research Conference on Digital
Library (IRCDL) 2017. Modena, Italy, 26-27 January, 2017
http://ircdl2017.unimore.it/index.php/organization/
06/2015 Reviewer for the International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction -
INTERACT 2015, http://www.interact2015.org/
25/09/2015 Presentation of the Digital Library DanteSources at the BRIGHT 2015 event,
Pisa:
http://nottedeiricercatori.pisa.it/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/leaflet_bright2015-CNR.pdf
11/2015 Reviewer for the International Conference on Digital Humanities 2016, http://dh2016.adho.org/
03/12/2014 – Invited speaker in the course of “Laboratory of the Digital Culture” at
University of Pisa, Computer Science degree. Title of the talk: “Dante in the Time of Semantic Web”, www.di.unipi.it/it/mese/details/132-seminario-CD-bartalesi
Thank you,
