Esplorare semanticamente collezioni culturali: uno studio di fattibilità

The aim of the study here presented is to reflect on ontologies as a cognitive tool for discovering knowledge, by revealing, through facets, possible latent connections – or even contradictory statements – between data. Moving from people, places, dates and event, as entities determined by a context-oriented perspective, we reflect on the possible use of multiple and interconnected domain ontologies (i.e. GO!, PRoles and HiCO) in order to explore the semantic content of heterogeneous digital collections (i.e. a digital library, a full-text scholarly edition, and a relational database) afferent to several projects into a wide cultural heritage domain (i.e. Geolat, Vespasiano da Bisticci Letters, and Zeri photo archive). A first example of the use of a meta-model (HiCO) for describing different collections is the starting point of this feasibility study.