Usability evaluation of the digital library DanteSources

In this paper we present DanteSources, a Digital Library of Dante Alighieri's primary sources, i.e. the works of other authors that Dante cites in his texts. Currently, this information is scattered in many books, making it difficult for the scholars to retrieve it and also to produce a systematical overview of the cultural background of Dante. In order to overcome this problem, an ontology expressed in RDF/S was developed to represent this knowledge. Once the ontology had been defined, we populated it with the data included in authoritative commentaries to Dante's works. We stored the resulting RDF graph into a Virtuoso triple store. Finally, on top of this graph, we developed DanteSources, which allows users to extract and display the knowledge stored in the knowledge base in the form of charts and tables. In this paper we present the results of a survey to collect suggestions and comments from end-users on their interactions with DanteSources in order to evaluate its usability.