Genealogical Data-Driven Visits of Historical Cemeteries

Abstract

This paper describes the Integration of Archives and Cultural Places (IaCuP) project, which aims to integrate information about a historical cemetery, including its map and grave inventory, with genealogical and documentary knowledge extracted from relevant historical archives. The integrated data are accessible to cemetery visitors through an interactive mobile application, enabling them to navigate a graphical representation of the cemetery while exploring comprehensive visualizations of genealogical data. The basic idea stems from the desire to provide people with access to the rich context of cultural sites, which have often lost their original references over the centuries, making it challenging for individuals today to interpret the meanings embedded within them. The proposed approach leverages large language models (LLMs) to extract information from relevant documents and Web technologies to represent such information as interactive visualizations. As a practical case study, this paper focuses on the Jewish Cemetery in Pisa and the Historical Archives of the Jewish Community in Pisa, working on the genealogical tree of one of the most representative families resting in the cemetery.

Keywords

• cultural heritage
• web applications
• text analytics
• generative AI
• genealogical tree visualization