Multilingual Specialist Glossaries in a Framework for Intangible Cultural Heritage

In this paper innovative modalities of online content-based retrieval and fruition are described and applied to an Italian photography collection. This article describes the integration of MultiWordNet in a terminological resource within a portal where these innovative methods provide users with semantic recommendations to broaden or restrict the search. MultiWordNet is the Italian version of the WordNet, a lexical database created and still maintained by the Cognitive Science Laboratory of Princeton University. WordNet groups words into sets of synonyms called synsets, provides short, general definitions, and records the various semantic relations between these synonym sets. The experiment was applied to the Museum of Contemporary Photography, whose collections dating from the Second World War to the present, with particular emphasis on the current evolution of the medium in its transition from analog practices to digital solutions.