Design and Implementation of a Web Application for Cultural Heritage

Abstract

Within the field of Digital Humanities, a great effort has been made to digitize documents and collections in order to build catalogs and exhibitions on the Web. In this paper, we present WeME, a Web application for building a knowledge base, which can be used to describe digital documents. WeME can be used by different categories of users: archivists/librarians and scholars. WeME extracts information from some well-known Linked Data nodes, i.e. DBpedia and GeoNames, as well as traditional Web sources, i.e. VIAF. As a use case of WeME, we describe the knowledge base related to the Christopher Clavius’s corre spondence. Clavius was a mathematician and an astronomer of the XVI Century. He wrote more than 300 letters, most of which are owned by the Historical Archives of the Pontifical Gregorian University (APUG) in Rome. The built knowledge base contains 139 links to DBpedia, 83 links to GeoNames and 129 links to VIAF. In order to test the usability of WeME, we invited 26 users to test the application.

Keywords

• metadata editor
• linked data
• knowledge base
• digital humanities.