Research topics

Knowledge Organization is a broader field than Library and Information Science (LIS). While LIS which encompassess the organization (and classification) of information in bibliographic records (including citation indexes, full text records, and cataloguing process), Knowledge Organisation involves also other disciplines, institutions, languages and symbolic systems, conceptual systems and theories, and literatures and genres.

Knowledge Representation refers to the formal representation of information so that computers can use it to solve more complex tasks. It is at the basis of Semantic Web and a key element in Ontology Engineering. Both of the research areas, their methods and theories are applied to the Arts and Humanities field and to the Cultural Heritage Domain (Libraries, Museums and Archives).

Data Science encompasses a number of methods and techniques for manipulating and extracting knowledge out of data. Rather than being a research topic, techniques that fall into Data Science category are applied to other research areas, e.g. Linguistics, Library and Information Science. A peculiarity of /DH.arc is indeed the focus on data rather than other types of technological applications.

Semantic Publishing concerns the use of Web and Semantic Web technologies and standards for enhancing a scholarly work semantically (by means of plain RDF statements, nano-publications, etc.) so as to improve its discoverability, interactivity, openness and (re-)usability for both humans and machines. The assumptions of openness implicit in Semantic Publishing have been also explicitly adopted for the publication of research data by the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Re-usable) data principles.

Computational Linguistics is the field investigating the usage of computational approaches to linguistic questions, so as to produce statistics and models out of natural language.

Digital Philology applies technical solutions to the study, the manipulation, and the publication of literary texts. Theoretical foundations of the discipline are purely humanistics, while approaches to solve specific problems are genuinely interdisciplinary. Among the main outputs of the research field are Digital Scholarly Editions. The usage of Semantic Web technologies allow to develop enhanced applications leveraging digital editions, called Semantic Digital Editions.