A Semantic Web Approach to Enable a Smart Route to Historical Archives

In this paper we show that an ontology-based approach can be beneficial for enhancing the access to cultural resources, and in particular historical documents. The paper starts with an overview of our approach, aimed at providing online archival systems with a semantic layer based on Semantic Web standards (OWL 2 and RDF). Two projects are introduced, namely Harlock900 and PRiSMHA, carried out in collaboration with local cultural institutions owning rich historical archives. In particular, the paper describes the computational ontologies supporting the approach, and then focuses on two case studies showing that our framework provides better results if compared with standard access systems. The case studies show the enhancement provided by a semantically rich representation of time intervals and a detailed formal description of events and their participants.