RESTORE: Opening Data in Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage

The RESTORE project (smaRt accESs TO digital heRitage and mEmory) started in June 2020 with a duration of 2 years. The project consortium, coordinated by the Istituto Opera del Vocabolario Italiano of the Italian CNR (National Research Council of Italy), includes national Cultural Heritage institutes, such as the State Archives and the Museum of Palazzo Pretorio in Prato and the Archival and Bibliographic Superintendency of Tuscany, and the SPACE SpA software company. The project - co-financed by the Regione Toscana - has its main purpose in the recovery, integration and accessibility of data and digital objects collected by partner, in order to build a knowledge base made of information regarding the history of the city and of its civic institutions, the development of its economic and entrepreneurial system, the role of women in the development of a welfare state and network. Starting a local history approach, it is nonetheless possible to broaden the focus from the local dimension to reconstruct a significant part of the history of European and Mediterranean cities of the 14th century, including commercial and economical aspects. This paper presents a focused overview on the mapping and modeling of archival and museum digital resources encoded with different standards, such as XML-EAD, XML-EAC, XML-TEI and ICCD-OA, and covered in the CIDOC-Conceptual Reference Model, the ontology that was chosen as “common language” for semantic data integration. The long term sustainability for the project’s results will be fostered by the collaboration with key players in the EU RIs environment, such as DARIAH-ERIC (ESFRI Landmark for the Humanities and Social Sciences) and E-RIHS (ESFRI project for the Heritage Science), as well as other actors within the EOSC Framework.