An Ontology and Knowledge Graph Infrastructure for Digital Library Knowledge Representation

Abstract

New technologies for storing and handling knowledge provide unprecedented opportunities for enhanced fruition of digital libraries and archives. Going beyond document retrieval based on lexical content or metadata, using the context of documents, and/or of their content, may provide very new ways to put them in perspective and grasp a deeper understanding thereof, also for non-technical users. Several components are needed to support this new perspective: suitable ontological resources to describe such variated knowledge, collaborative tools to collect the precious knowledge scattered across many scholars and practitioners spread all over the world, and to store it in a knowledge base, fruition tools to make the collected knowledge available to all interested stakeholders (scholars, researchers, but also common people). This paper proposes the GraphBRAIN environment as a possible infrastructure. It is a general-purpose tool that allows its users to design and populate knowledge graphs, to collaboratively enrich them, and to exploit advanced fruition tools, consultation and analysis tools. Its functionality may also be provided as a set of Web services to end-user applications. An initial version of the ontology and knowledge graph for digital libraries and archives are also presented and discussed in the paper.