Conference - Alessandro Adamou
It is with great pleasure that we invite you to a stimulating conference that promises to shed light on the role of knowledge graph technologies in the history of digital art and the history of science. The conference will be held in English.
Lecture Title: Knowledge Graph Technologies in Digital Art History and the History of Science: Implementation, Challenges, and Opportunities
Speaker: Alessandro Adamou
ABSTRACT:
Several fields in digital humanities research, particularly those related to cultural heritage, have begun to acknowledge the importance of knowledge graphs in organizing and analyzing vast amounts of heterogeneous data. So too are these technologies taking hold among historical disciplines, like the histories of art, music, and science: their scholars appreciate the flexibility of Semantic Web paradigms like RDF for accommodating the phenomenological nature of their data, yet express concern at the state of their standardised representation to support the degree of diachrony they require.
This talk delves into some applications of the Semantic Web in digital humanities and art history, highlighting its transformative potential and addressing key issues shaping its implementation. The intrinsic value of data managed using Semantic Web technologies transcends the specific platform used for their curation and display. By employing RDF, SPARQL, and graph databases, data retain their value regardless of the virtual research environment or content management system that lies on top of them. Furthermore, shared ontologies such as CIDOC-CRM, Europeana's EDM, and FRBR play a crucial role in ensuring data interoperability and consistency: when implementing data schemas using these ontologies, the need for a system or a scholar to interpret data diminishes.
Finally, the talk demonstrates some practical applications through three instances of a semantic data management system implemented by the Bibliotheca Hertziana to serve different use cases: a virtual online art exhibition, a gazetteer of Medieval liturgical furnishing, and a census of ancient scientific book copies. These examples altogether show how a common reusable conceptual framework can streamline the implementation and interoperability of data-driven research and cataloguing projects.
BIO :
Alessandro Adamou is a Digital Humanties Scientist at the Bibliotheca Hertziana - Max Planck Institute for Art History. He leads data standardisation and integration efforts for data-intensive research projects at the Institute. His long-standing research interest is in the application of Semantic Web technologies to answer particular research questions arising in Digital Humanities research, such as modelling intangible cultural heritage, e.g. human experience, style, cultural influence and symbolism. This had led to collaborative projects with institutions like the Royal College of Music (Listening Experience Database), the Irish Traditional Music Archive (LITMUS project), and UniL and EPFL (Crossings - cultural contact evidence in Southern Chinese martial arts). He has been a member of the Apache Software Foundation, co-founding the Apache Stanbol project, and is currently a member of the Association for Computing Machinery, with which he co-organises the ACM Hypertext conference series.