A new digital library project for the semantic representation of the comments to the "«Commedia»: Hypermedia Dante Network

Abstract

Dante is the most studied Italian author in the world, and it is not really a coincidence that some of the most pioneering initiatives in Digital Humanities are due to Dante’s philology. The Hypermedia Dante Network project aims to build a digital library that contains comments to the Comedy formally represented according to the standards of the Semantic Web, with two main purposes: to put at the service of humanists a body of knowledge to be explored also with the help of agents digital to formulate and verify scientific hypotheses; and to build new applications for the visualization of this knowledge for non-experts. The digital library will account for the phenomena of intertextuality and interdiscursiveness in the Comedy, continuing the work undertaken by a similar previous project focused on Dante’s minor works. To articulate knowledge in a logically transparent format, the standards that have been chosen are the Resource Description Framework (RDF) for the encoding of factual knowledge and OWL (Web Ontology Language) 2 for the encoding of the ontology. In addition to developing the ontology, the project will provide humanists with a tool for the collection of knowledge and a portal to provide access to the knowledge collected.