Distant Reading Through Ontologies: The Case Study of Catania’s Benedictines Monastery

Abstract

In this contribution, we developed a Linked Open Dataset, more specifically an OWL ontology, about the history of the renovation of the Catania’s Benedictines Monastery by the architect Giancarlo De Carlo. We considered a wide subset of public and private documents collected from 1977 to 2006 during the process of restoration and adaptation of the monastery to a campus for the University of Catania. The task of modelling and population of the ontology have been carried out from the analysis of documents stored in the “Archivio del Museo della Fabbrica”, in the new archive of professor Giuseppe Giarrizzo, in the private collection of Antonino Leonardi, and from the conceptual map of the locations of the monastery.

Keywords

• Semantic Web
• Ontology
• Distant Reading
• Cultural Heritage
• Archives.