Paolo Bufalini’s Notebook

Abstract

Paolo Bufalini’s Notebook (from here on PBN) is a critical edition of the personal notebook that the Italian politician and intellectual Paolo Bufalini held from 1981 to 1991. The edition offers the opportunity to plunge into the flow of thoughts of a man of the twentieth century who reflects on philosophy, poetry, and politics. The methodical goal of this edition, which is implemented with XML/TEI and RDF graphs, is to create an encoding system using Semantic Web technologies, able to emphasize the complex network of quotations and annotations that fills the pages. The digital edition aims to follow a data-centric paradigm. In this light, PBN is connected to authority files and external knowledge bases, such as DBpedia, VIAF, and WorldCat, to harness the power of the Linked Open Data universe. This review provides the reader with an overview of Paolo Bufalini’s work and the main features of the semantic critical edition. Finally, PBN can be evaluated as a decent edition, which responds to certain requirements of a digital edition, but not to all, and it still lends itself to improvements and new developments.

Keywords

• notebook
• semantic web
• scholarly digital edition
• rdf
• linked open data