Ontology-driven Visual Browsing of Historical Industrial Archives

The paper presents the outcomes of a regional project funded by the European Commission, aiming at identifying new strategies in the management and access of historical industrial archives. The study addresses different issues concerning the access to digital archives, such as data search and browsing. The paper focuses on data browsing proposing a semantic framework to support the different users' communities in the exploration of industrial archives, based on two main components: a knowledge model of the archive content formalised in an ontology and a visual browsing module, which exploits ontology and visual exploration tools to facilitate the navigation of the archive content.