Linking Tangible to Intangible: a Sustainable Workflow for Cultural Heritage and Humanities Data Integration

The aim of this poster is to present the work carried out by the DARIAH-IT team at CNR-OVI (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche - Opera del Vocabolario Italiano) within the context of several national and international projects such as the SSHOC thematic cluster, the IPERION-HS H2020 project and the Italian Roadmap for the development of the DARIAH national node. The paper will focus on issues related to the collection, analysis and digital processing of resources and collections provided by memory and cultural institutions (GLAMs) and Research Organisations. In particular, we will present and discuss the most relevant findings and experiences and present a sustainable workflow for ingesting, mapping, modelling and visualising data collections from the aforementioned research domains. The discussion will build on the experience of the RESTORE (smaRt accESs TO digital heRitage and mEmory, http://restore.ovi.cnr.it/) project, focussed on providing access to a vast number of non-interoperable digital resources produced by Archives, Museums and Research Institutes during a couple of decades of work. Another goal of RESTORE was to create the right conditions to promote the interpretation, contextualisation and understanding of digital cultural heritage objects by representing their semantic depth and thus reconstructing the complex network of interconnections with other entities (persons, objects, places, concepts) by restoring the links existing between the tangible (intellectual aspects) and the intangible (physical aspects) dimensions of Cultural Heritage. The poster will focus on different aspects related to the development of the RESTORE platform, including: the architectural design and the implementation of the semantic knowledge base; the integration of custom components to support domain specific standards and needs; the elaboration of specialised interfaces to display information according to the different partners’ needs and resources characteristics; the deployment of tools allowing the users to access the resources in their original contexts or in a new - highly integrated - environment, allowing the transition from a conventional display (lists of data) to a data-graph representation with semantic implications. Particular relevance will be given to: Issues in describing and representing tangible and intangible aspects of CH in the digital domain and their implications for the development of innovative, cross-domain, multilingual research tools; Design and implementation of workflows and tools supporting requirements gathered from the scientific reference communities (SSHOC, IPERION-HS); Population of the RESTORE infrastructure and its scalability towards the Italian (i.e.: H2IOSC National Recovery and Resilience Plan) and European contexts (i.e.: EGI-ACE) within the DARIAH framework; best practices to foster interoperability and to ensure reuse and sustainability of data collections and tools. Development of a prototype supporting specific scientific workflows related to linguistic data (i.e. digital textual corpora and digital lexicography);