I.PaC and semantic graphs to represent Italian Cultural Heritage

I.PaC (Infrastructure and Services for Cultural Heritage) [CN23] is the technological core of the National Digital Ecosystem for Culture- Ecomic, an initiative developed within Italy’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR). It is designed to support the management, enrichment, and accessibility of digital cultural resources, and it is developed not merely as a data repository but as an advanced infrastructure that enables new models of interaction and valorization of cultural heritage. I.PaC represents the central hub of the ecosystem and it integrates and connects heterogeneous systems, allowing cultural institutions to ingest, manage, and reuse digital data through a comprehensive range of services. The infrastructure also provides services for digital asset management (DAM) and advanced content processing, allowing institutions to optimize digitization processes and improving the quality of their metadata. Akeyfeature of I.PaC is the use of domain-specific and cross-domain graphs: these graphs allow to create relationships between cultural objects from different fields (archival, bibliographic, museum, and multimedia), enabling cross-domain navigation and a richer reconstruction of cultural contexts. Ononehand the domain-specific graphs serve as vertical, in-depth models that structure and organize all the relevant information within each cultural sector. They ensure a high level of specialization and interoperability, since they are based on national and international description standard, and they enhance metadata thanks to AI technologies based on entity recognition, disambiguation, and data enrichment. Each domain graph retains its internal logic while benefiting from a shared semantic foundation. On the other hand, the cross-domain knowledge graph provides a transversal representation of information about cultural heritage, by modeling common entities and their relationships, which can then be reused across all domain-specific graphs. This approach enables the integration of information from traditionally separate disciplines, revealing unexpected connections. By implementing I.PaC’s semantic graphs, Italy’s cultural institutions can transition from static data repositories to dynamic, knowledge-driven platforms, creating new opportunities for accessibility and valorization.