2017
Other
Open Access
An Ontology for Narratives
Bartalesi Lenzi VOne of the main problems of the current Digital Libraries (DLs) is the limitation of the informative services offered to the user who aims at discovering the resources of the DL by queries in natural language. Indeed, all DLs provide simple search functionalities that return a ranked list of their resources. No semantic relation among the returned objects is usually reported that could help the user to obtain a more complete knowledge on the subject of the search. The introduction of the Semantic Web, and in particular of the Linked Data, has the potential of improving the search functionalities of DLs. In this context, the long-term aim of this thesis has been to introduce the narrative as new first-class search functionality. As output of a query, the envisaged new search functionality should not only return a list of objects but it should also present one or more narratives, composed of events that are linked to the objects of the existing libraries (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, the thesis presents an ontology for representing narratives, along with a tool for the construction of narratives based on the ontology. Moreover, it has used to the tool for evaluating the ontology in the context of an experiment centred on the biography of the Italian poet Dante Alighieri, the major Italian poet of the late Middle Ages. More specifically:
- An overview of the related works developed in the Semantic Web field and in Narratology, and especially in its sub branch named Computational Narratology
was reported. The basic principles of Narratology and Computational Narratology have been reviewed along with the study of the Artificial Intelligence literature, especially of the Event Calculus theory, in order to identify the formal components of narratives.
- A conceptualization of narratives has been developed, based on notions derived
from narratology and Artificial Intelligence. According to this conceptualization, a narrative consists of a fabula, i.e. the events of a story in chronologically ordered, and several narrations of this fabula (plots), linked to the fabula by an event association relation. A mathematical expression of the conceptualization has been given, in order to provide a characterization of the conceptualization as clear and as precise as possible, also to be used as a basis for the subsequent development of an ontology of narratives, encoded in OWL. The proposed conceptualization has been validated by expressing it into an existing ontology, the CIDOC CRM, and by endowing it with provenance knowledge, also expressed in a derivation of the CRM, named CRMinf. This expression has been used in the validation experiment, consisting in the modelling a narrative of the biography of Dante Alighieri, provided by a biographer who has scientifically supported this research.
- The population of the created ontology has been performed by means of a semiautomatic approach implemented by a tool for the construction of narratives which obey the ontology. This tool retrieves and assigns URIs to the instances of the classes of the ontology using Wikidata as external resource and also facilitates the construction and contextualization of events, and their linking to form the fabulae of narratives.
- Finally, a qualitative validation of the developed ontology has been carried out. This validation has regarded the evaluation of: (i) the representational adequacy of the ontology by a Dante Alighieri's expert; (ii) the effectiveness of the narrative building tool; (iii) the satisfaction of the users' requirements defined at the beginning of the study. To prove the last point, initial requirements representing pre-requisites of this work have been satisfied by demonstrating that a SPARQL query can be always built to extract the requested information from the knowledge base embodying the narrative.Project(s): PARTHENOS 
See at:
etd.adm.unipi.it
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2023
Conference article
Open Access
Creating and visualising semantic story maps
Bartalesi Lenzi V.A narrative is a conceptual basis of collective human understanding. Humans use stories to represent characters' intentions, feelings and the attributes of objects, and events. A widely-held
thesis in psychology to justify the centrality of narrative in human life is that humans make sense of reality by structuring events into narratives. Therefore, narratives are central to human
activity in cultural, scientic, and social areas. Story maps are computer science realizations of narratives based on maps. They are online interactive maps enriched with text, pictures,
videos, and other multimedia information, whose aim is to tell a story over a territory. This talk presents a semi-automatic workow that, using a CRM-based ontology and the Semantic
Web technologies, produces semantic narratives in the form of story maps (and timelines as an alternative representation) from textual documents. An expert user rst assembles one
territory-contextual document containing text and images. Then, automatic processes use natural language processing and Wikidata services to (i) extract entities and geospatial points
of interest associated with the territory, (ii) assemble a logically-ordered sequence of events that constitute the narrative, enriched with entities and images, and (iii) openly publish online
semantic story maps and an interoperable Linked Open Data-compliant knowledge base for event exploration and inter-story correlation analyses. Once the story maps are published, the
users can review them through a user-friendly web tool. Overall, our workow complies with Open Science directives of open publication and multi-discipline support and is appropriate to
convey "information going beyond the map" to scientists and the large public. As demonstrations, the talk will show workow-produced story maps to represent (i) 23 European rural areas across 16 countries, their value chains and territories, (ii) a Medieval journey, (iii) the history of the legends, biological investigations, and AI-based modelling for habitat discovery of the giant squid Architeuthis dux.Source: CEUR WORKSHOP PROCEEDINGS, pp. 3-4. Dublin, Ireland, 02/04/2023
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ceur-ws.org
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2009
Journal article
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The LME project: legislative metadata based on semantic formal model
Bartalesi Lenzi V, Biagioli C, Cappelli A, Sprugnoli R, Turchi FThe Law Making Environment (LME) system for planning, drafting and managing legislative sources is made up of editing and search support tools. To handle the sematics of legislative sources, two interacting models have been created: a rule model, which can describe the illocutionary profile of legislative texts through metadata, and a lightweight ontology. The search support tool, LMEmetaSearch, based on both models, is able to search for rules in legislative sources, and additionally to find implicit or complementary rules providing the user with a wide account on the subject.Source: INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF METADATA, SEMANTICS AND ONTOLOGIES (PRINT), vol. 4 (issue 3), pp. 154-164
DOI: 10.1504/ijmso.2009.027751Metrics:
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International Journal of Metadata Semantics and Ontologies
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2008
Conference article
Metadata Only Access
Evaluation of natural language tools for italian: EVALITA 2007
Magnini B, Cappelli A, Tamburini F, Bosco C, Mazzei A, Lombardo V, Bertagna F, Calzolari N, Toral Ruiz A, Bartalesi Lenzi V, Sprugnoli R, Speranza MEVALITA 2007, the first edition of the initiative devoted to the evaluation of Natural Language Processing tools for Italian, provided a shared framework where participants' systems had the possibility to be evaluated on five different tasks, namely Part of Speech Tagging (organised by the University of Bologna), Parsing (organised by the University of Torino), Word Sense Disambiguation (organised by CNR-ILC, Pisa), Temporal Expression Recognition and Normalization (organised by CELCT, Trento), and Named Entity Recognition (organised by FBK, Trento). We believe that the diffusion of shared tasks and shared evaluation practices is a crucial step towards the development of resources and tools for Natural Language Processing. Experiences of this kind, in fact, are a valuable contribution to the validation of existing models and data, allowing for consistent comparisons among approaches and among representation schemes. The good response obtained by EVALITA, both in the number of participants and in the quality of results, showed that pursuing such goals is feasible not only for English, but also for other languages.
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2015
Other
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Knowledge acquisition on Dante Alighieri's works
Locuratolo Ei, Bartalesi Lenzi VThe approach followed for the identification and the implementation of visualization diagrams able to support the knowledge acquisition on Dante's works is described. Two high level structures and an implementation model are proposed. An example of citation histogram is given; one of its possible refinements is considered. The article is part of the Towards a Digital Dante Encyclopedia, a three-year Italian National Project which aims to build a digital library endowed with services to support scholars in creating, evolving and consulting an encyclopedia on Dante Alighieri and on his works.
See at:
CNR IRIS
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2015
Journal article
Open Access
Towards a semantic network of Dante's works and their contextual knowledge
Bartalesi Lenzi V, Meghini C, Andriani P, Tavoni MWe present the achievements of the 'Towards a Digital Dante Encyclopaedia' project, a 3-year Italian National Research Project that aims at building a digital library endowed with services supporting scholars in creating, evolving, and consulting a digital encyclopaedia of Dante Alighieri and his works. Our main goal is to represent and visualize the knowledge of the primary sources that Dante refers to in his works. Currently, this information is scattered in many books, making it difficult to systematically overview the culture of Dante in order to obtain a well-founded perception of how this culture was gradually constructed over time. We describe a semantic representation of the involved texts and knowledge based on the Semantic Web languages. The representation is freely available as an XML document, and it can be easily acquired, e.g. by other researchers in order to extend the representation with additional texts and knowledge. We also present a web application that allows users to extract and display these texts and knowledge in the form of charts and tables. In particular, the application supports the visualization of the data related to the primary sources according to different parameters (e.g. in chronological order, by author, by work). Furthermore, it allows exploring the dynamics of the multi-faceted culture of Dante in relation to the diverse and often conflicting stages of his biography.Source: DIGITAL SCHOLARSHIP IN THE HUMANITIES, vol. 30_suppl.1, pp. i28-i35
DOI: 10.1093/llc/fqv044Metrics:
See at:
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
| dsh.oxfordjournals.org
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| ISTI Repository
| Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
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2017
Journal article
Open Access
Using an ontology for representing the knowledge on literary texts: the Dante Alighieri case study
Bartalesi Lenzi V, Meghini CThis paper describes a digital library developed within the "Towards a Digital Dante Encyclopaedia" project, a three years Italian National Research Project that aims at building services supporting scholars in creating, evolving and consulting a digital encyclopaedia of Dante Alighieri's works. The digital library is based on a knowledge base storing knowledge on the primary sources that Dante refers to in his works, i.e. the works of other authors Dante refers to in his texts. At present, this information is scattered on many paper books, making it difficult to systematically overview the cultural background of Dante and to obtain a well-founded perception of how this background was gradually set up in time. The same applies also to other authors, therefore the applicability of our work extends well beyond the specific author we are considering in our project. The digital library that we are building is based on an ontology for representing the knowledge on one author's works and on the primary sources embedded in the commentaries to these works. Following this approach, a semantic network of Dante's works and of references to primary sources of these works was created. Furthermore, a web application allowing users to explore the semantic network in various ways and to visualize statistical information about the references as charts and tables was developed.Source: SEMANTIC WEB (PRINT), vol. 8 (issue 3), pp. 385-394
DOI: 10.3233/sw-150198Metrics:
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content.iospress.com
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| ISTI Repository
| Semantic Web
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2015
Other
Restricted
Knowledge acquisition on Dante Alighieri's works
Locuratolo Ei, Bartalesi Lenzi VThe approach followed for the identification and the implementation of visualization diagrams able to support the knowledge acquisition on Dante's works is described. Two high level structures and an implementation model are proposed. An example of citation histogram is given; one of its possible refinements is considered. The article is part of the Towards a Digital Dante Encyclopedia, a three-year Italian National Project which aims to build a digital library endowed with services to support scholars in creating, evolving and consulting an encyclopedia on Dante Alighieri and on his works.
See at:
CNR IRIS
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2017
Contribution to book
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Formal components of narratives
Bartalesi Lenzi V, Meghini COne of the main problems of the current Digital Libraries (DLs) is the limitation of the informative services offered to the users, who express their queries in natural language. Indeed, DLs provide simple search functionalities that return a list of the information objects contained in them. No semantic relation among the returned objects is usually reported, which could help the user in obtaining a more complete knowledge on the subject of the search. The introduction of the Semantic Web, and in particular of the Linked Data, has the potential of improving the search functionalities of DLs. In this context, our final aim is to introduce the narrative as new first-class search functionality. As output of a query, the new search functionality does not only return a list of objects but it also presents a narrative, composed of events that are linked to the objects of the library and endowed with a set of semantic relations connecting these events into a meaningful semantic network. This paper presents a study of the Artificial Intelligence literature, especially of the Event Calculus theory, in order to identify the formal components of narratives. Furthermore, the mapping between these components and the standard ontology CIDOC CRM is presented, in order to evaluate if it could be taken as reference vocabulary to create an ontology for narratives. On the top of this ontology, we will develop the new search functionality for DLs.Source: COMMUNICATIONS IN COMPUTER AND INFORMATION SCIENCE (PRINT), pp. 112-121
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-56300-8_11Project(s): PARTHENOS
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doi.org
| CNR IRIS
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| link.springer.com
2021
Conference article
Open Access
The IMAGO project: towards a knowledge base of medieval and renaissance geographical works
Bartalesi Lenzi V, Pratelli NThe image of the world created by the Medieval and Renaissance culture was crucial to the development of Western thought in European history. To the best of our knowledge Medieval and Renaissance geographical works have not been studied using digital methods.
The three years (2020-2023) Italian National research project IMAGO - Index Medii Aevi Geographiae Operum - aims at providing a systematic overview of this literature using Semantic Web technologies. As the first step to develop tools to support scholars in creating, evolving and consulting a knowledge base (KB) of the geographical works, we created an OWL 2 DL ontology. Following the re-use logic and to maximize the interoperability, we developed the ontology as an extension of two reference ontologies, that is the CIDOC CRM vocabulary and its extension FRBRoo, including its in-progress reformulation, LRMoo. In this paper, we present the project, the ontology and the tool to populate it that we developed. Furthermore, we present a preliminary study to map the works collected in the IMAGO KB and the manuscripts stored in the KB of the Mapping Manuscript Migrations project.Source: CEUR WORKSHOP PROCEEDINGS. Bolzano, 20-21/09/2021
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ceur-ws.org
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2023
Book
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Semantic Web - Introduction to Semantic Web languages
Meghini C, Bartalesi Lenzi VThe Web makes a very large amount of information available to users in the form of documents. The Semantic Web is a fundamental extension of the web as it allows, in addition to documents, the sharing of data (including document metadata) in a standard format along with their semantic context expressed in a formal and shared language. Applications in documentary science, biology, cultural heritage and electronic commerce have already demonstrated the validity of this approach. This volume constitutes a gentle introduction to the technologies and languages of the semantic web, clearly illustrating the steps necessary to transform a product published on the web into a set of data that can be processed and reused across applications, users and communities. This is the second monograph of the ebook series "Digital Culture Notebooks" edited by the Laboratory of Digital Culture of the University of Pisa (http://www.labcd.unipi.it) and published by Simonelli editore. The series houses short monographs on tools and research in the field of Digital Humanities which emerged from the work of teachers and students who collaborate with the Laboratory itself. It aims to support a wider dissemination of digital culture, understood as the field in which the humanities and some sectors of informatics interact and collaborate.
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CNR IRIS
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| www.mondadoristore.it
2024
Conference article
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Using geospatial semantic web for exploring geographic knowledge in medieval manuscripts
Pratelli N., Bartalesi Lenzi V.This paper explores the capabilities of the Geospatial Semantic Web to support scholars in studying the geographic knowledge included in medieval and Renaissance works. In the context of the Italian national research project IMAGO, we developed a CRM-based ontology that aligns with the Open Geospatial Consortium (OCG) GeoSPARQL standard. The ontology enables geospatial queries on the IMAGO knowledge graph. The results of these queries, as detailed in this paper, demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach in representing the geospatial data and in inferring new knowledge. For example, using this approach, we are able to identify all the works that mention places in a specific region, or by combining geographic knowledge with knowledge about the literary genre of the works, we can identify authors who travelled to a particular territory, such as the Holy Land. Furthermore, combining temporal and geospatial information enables us to discover places within a particular territory mentioned in manuscripts of a specific century. These examples demonstrate the potential of the Geospatial Semantic Web approach to uncover previously hidden connections and enrich our understanding of historical and geographical data.Source: LECTURE NOTES IN COMPUTER SCIENCE, vol. 15178, pp. 74-84. Ljubljana, Slovenia, 24–27/09/2024
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-72440-4_7Metrics:
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doi.org
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2013
Conference article
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A Preliminary Study on the Semantic Representation of the notes to Dante Alighieri's Convivio
Bartalesi Lenzi V, Locuratolo E I, Meghini C, Versienti LWe present a study on the semantic representation of the knowledge embedded in the notes to Convivio, a philosophical essay composed by Dante Alighieri. The notes were produced by an Italian scholar in structured text format. First, we analyzed the content of the document annotated by the scholar and on this basis we created an underlying high-level UML model that plays the role of an initial conceptualization. In the second step, we tried to identify terms belonging to vocabularies used in the Digital Libraries domain, which could be used for specifying the UML conceptualization. To this end, we investigated several existing ontologies, and we chose the terms that we considered useful to represent our knowledge. In order to describe all the knowledge embedded in the notes, we added classes and properties. Finally, we built a RDF graph that represents the semantics of the notes.DOI: 10.1145/2517978.2517983Metrics:
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dl.acm.org
| doi.org
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2015
Software
Metadata Only Access
DanteSources
Bartalesi Lenzi V, Meghini C, Andriani P, Metilli DDanteSources is a tool that allows you to retrieve information about Dante's primary sources. DanteSources allows you to visualize through tables and charts the list and the distribution of primary sources, authors and thematic areas cited by Dante in his works.
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CNR IRIS
| perunaenciclopediadantescadigitale.eu