In this paper we discuss the issues related to the formal representation of thematic roles in an ontology modeling historical events. We start by analyzing the ontological distinctions between thematic roles and social roles, which suggest different formal representations. Coupling the study of existing approaches with an analysis of historical texts  available within the Harlock'900 project  we propose a formal representation of thematic roles in HERO (Historical Event Representation Ontology), based on binary properties, directly connecting the event to its participants. Moreover, we show that a fine-grained formal ontological model of participation in (historical) events should include general thematic roles (e.g., agent, patient)  able to capture the common aspects of the ways entities are involved in events  and event-specific roles (e.g., sniper), introduced in the ontology according to a specific criterion, that guarantees the needed expressivity without proliferating roles. We conclude the paper by discussing the benefits of our approach.

This paper presents the results of the extraction of named entities from a collection of historical memoirs about the italian Resistance during the World War II. The methodology followed for the extraction and disambiguation task will be discussed, as well as its evaluation. For the semantic annotations of the dataset, we have developed a pipeline based on established practices for extracting and disambiguating Named Entities. This has been necessary, considering the poor performances of out-of-the-box Named Entity Recognition and Disambiguation (NERD) tools tested in the initial phase of this work.

Abstract. Historical documentary heritage has a high potential for supporting citizens' awareness about their culture and identity.However, to exploit this potential, access tools are needed, which integrate data from heterogeneous sources and provide an effective user interaction. Moreover, historical archives can become a useful and attractive cultural resource, if they are exploited in popular contexts, like education and tourism: innovative ICT-based applications can employ documents, pictures, etc. to guide students and tourists in the discovery of interesting stories, connecting the present to the past, and providing a larger audience with a "live" access to original cultural heritage resources. In particular, we claim that this scenario can be enabled by providing ICT tools with a rich semantic layer, based on computational ontologies, in which the notions of event and role play a major role. Such a semantic layer can be further enriched by exploiting resources available in the Linked Open Data cloud.

Abstract:In this paper we present a project aimed at enhancing a collaborative environment for resource management (SemT++) with domain knowledge, represented by a local ontology and a connection to external data, retrieved from Linked Open Data sets. Our approach is based on the assumption that heterogeneous resources can be viewed as "information objects", and can be organized within collaborative spaces (i.e., "round tables"). Information objects, among other properties, are characterized by their content. Annotations representing resource content (e.g., "Torino") can thus be linked to domain knowledge which provides users with useful information. We tested this approach on the geographic domain, by connecting resources to commonsense geographic knowledge and to information available in GeoNames.

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