Towards a Semantic Network of Dante's Works and Their Contextual Knowledge

In the field of digital humanities, scholars are increasingly producing digital editions of texts and manuscripts. The representation of knowledge included in literary texts is a complex issue, requiring rich vocabularies, also called ontologies, for representing the many different aspects that are investigated by scholars. In literature, there are many ontologies that focus on different aspects of textual information but one single ontology representing all these aspects does not exist. The "Towards a Digital Dante Encyclopedia" project is a three years Italian National Research Project, started in 2012, that aims at building a prototypical digital library endowed with services supporting scholars in creating, evolving and consulting a digital encyclopedia of Dante Alighieri and of his works. The digital library is based on a semantic representation of Dante's works and of the knowledge embedded in them in RDF language 1 , a language recommended by the Web Consortium for the representation of knowledge. In RDF, every piece of knowledge is represented as a triple (subject predicate object), and a set of triples form an RDF graph, generally called semantic network, in order to highlight the formal linguistic nature of the representation. The services being developed address several tasks carried out by the scholars building the encyclopedia, starting with the visualization of references to primary sources (i.e., other authors' works which Dante referred to his own works), their types and their distribution both in time and in the works of Dante. The overall goal is to shed light into the cultural context in which Dante wrote his works and into the development of Dante's reference library over time. This part of the project is divided in several phases. The first phase regards the creation of an ontology for the knowledge embedded in scholarly commentaries to Convivio 2 , the philosophical treatise which we choose as an initial case study. In the second phase, the ontological model is generalized to represent the knowledge embedded in the scholarly commentaries to other Dante's works. In the third phase, Dante's works along with their attached commentaries are inserted into the digital library, as part of the semantic network being built. In the fourth phase, the primary sources referenced by Dante in his works, as reported by the commentaries, are inserted into the digital library, following the same semantic approach. In the last phase, services are developed, as web applications that allow scholars to browse the semantic network of Dante's work, of primary sources, or of references linking the former to the latter. The references will be visualized in an intuitive way through tables and charts, highlighting their distribution in Dante's work and over time. We present the structure of the semantic network, as it currently stands and indicate how it will be further developed. Furthermore, we highlight the benefits brought by the visualization service of primary sources to scholars.