DanteSources is a focused digital library endowed with web services that allow visualizing information on Dante Alighieri’s primary sources in form of charts and tables. The visualized charts can be exported in various well-known formats like PDF and JPEG, but the data can be also exported in CSV format, to lend them to further analyses. DanteSources makes information about Dante’s primary sources available in digital format for the first time. Having the information about primary sources dispersed on paper books makes it difficult to systematically overview how the cultural background of Dante evolved in time. On the other hand, the automatic visualization of data allows understanding the development of Dante’s cultural background in comparison with the different phases of his biography.

1. DanteSources: The Digital Library of Dante
Alighieri’s Primary Sources
Valentina Bartalesi, Carlo Meghini, Daniele
Metilli, Paola Andriani, Mirko Tavoni
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2. The Project
• “Per una Enciclopedia Dantesca Digitale” is an Italian National
project that aims at building a digital library endowed with services
supporting scholars in creating, evolving and consulting a digital
encyclopaedia of Dante Alighieri’s works
• Collaboration between ISTI-CNR and the Dipartimento di Filologia,
Letteratura e Linguistica of the University of Pisa  Data set of Dante’s
works along with their commentaries
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3. The Focus of the Project
Current focus: citations to primary sources
• Statistics
• Evolution of Dante’s knowledge of primary sources
• Impact of primary sources on Dante’s thought
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4. Goals
1. Collecting and organizing literary texts and knowledge about them,
for the purposes of:
• disseminating
• producing new knowledge
2. Developing an ontology for representing the knowledge of texts,
used for implementing the following functions:
• storing
• accessing
• processing
The mean: Semantic Web technologies
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5. What Is an Ontology?
An ontology is a formal framework for representing knowledge. This
framework names and defines the classes and relationships in
a domain of discourse using axioms
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Joh
n
Bil
l
Mary
<foaf:Person>
<foaf:name>John</foaf:name>
<foaf:hasFriend>
<foaf:Person>
<foaf:name>Susan</foaf:name
>
</foaf:Person>
</foaf:knows>
</foaf:Person>

6. Our Approach
…ontology expressed in the Semantic Web languages:
• RDF, OWL
… following the Linked Data recommendations:
• HTTP URIs for denoting resources
• a description for every resource
• links to (and hopefully from) other datasets
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7. Ontology and Ontology Population
• To maximize interoperability we have re-used existing ontologies
WHERE POSSIBLE, adding our own classes and relationships IF
NECESSARY
• FRBR, FRBRoo, SAWS, DM2E Model, Dublin Core, SKOS, FOAF, DoCO,
FaBIO, CiTO, Annotation Ontology, CIDOC-CRM, Open Annotation
Core Data Model, NEPOMUK
• Model population
• Knowledge base in RDF stored in the triple store Virtuoso
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8. Data Processing: From DOC/PDF to
VIRTUOSO
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9. From RDF to OWL Ontology
3 dicembre 2014 Valentina BARTALESI LENZI 9
• Currently, we are translating our ontology from RDF
to OWL in order to add axioms that allow to infer
new knowledge

10. Schematic Representation of a Part of
Our Ontology
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11. Advantages for Researchers
• Researchers can add classes and relationships to our ontology,
thereby refining it
• Our ontology can be linked to other ontologies to extend the
represented domain
• Any user can download and use our model freely, using the
paradigm of Linked Data
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12. DanteSources 1/4
• We developed the digital library DanteSources (Java, JavaScript,
Ajax) to extract and display the knowledge stored in our
knowledge base
• We used the SPARQL query language to extract knowledge
• The extracted knowledge is represented as charts (Highcharts
library) and tables, as well as in CSV format
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13. DanteSources 2/4
At the moment, DanteSources allows the user to see:
 The cited primary sources
 The cited authors
 The cited thematic areas
 The type of reference in the Dante’s works
 The type of reference in the primary sources
The data:
 Convivio (Fioravanti)
 Monarchia (Quaglioni)
 De vulgari eloquentia (Tavoni)
 Vita Nova (Gorni and De Robertis)
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14. DanteSources 3/4
• DanteSources is compliant with the W3C guidelines for usability
• Layout responsive
• Italian and English version
• SPARQL end point
Having this information available in digital format improves and makes the
research of primary sources by the scholars more efficient
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15. DanteSources 4/4
• Current running application:
dantesources.org
Currently, we are running a user test to evaluate the
usability of DanteSources and its services
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16. Some Number!
 714 primary sources
 273 cited authors
 45 thematic areas
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17. Advantages for Scholars
• Visualization of the data in form of tables and charts
• Data overview
• Possibility to easily compare the data
• Possibility the export the data in CSV format to apply
further data analyses
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18. Conclusions
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4. SPARQL end-point
3. Digital Library to visualize data
1. Ontology
2. Tool to populate the ontology and to
translate the data in RDF

19. Thank
you
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dantesources.org
valentina.bartalesi@isti.cnr.it