The ATLAS Web Application: live | v1.0 | v2.0 -

The ATLAS Platform is a digital infrastructure designed to build and publish a knowledge graph of international scholarly research on Italian Cultural Heritage. It integrates data from diverse sources to provide a comprehensive and interconnected view of research products, projects, individuals, and practices in the field. Through this web portal, ATLAS enables users to create, explore, interpret, and engage with the knowledge graph, supporting both academic research and public engagement. The platform is built on CLEF (Crowdsourcing Linked Entities via web Form), a lightweight, Linked Open Data–native cataloguing system for crowdsourcing projects.

The ATLAS Ontology: v1.0 | v2.0 -

The ATLAS Ontology is an OWL 2 DL ontology designed to effectively represent scholarly research projects and their outcomes within the Cultural Heritage domain. It highlights key characteristics of significant types of research products, including Text Collection, Digital Scholarly Edition, Linked Open Data, Ontology, Software, Language Model, and 3D Digital Twin. By capturing their unique attributes, ATLAS aims to promote good practices, sharing protocols, guidelines, and evaluation frameworks within the humanities.

The ATLAS Knowledge Graph: v1.0 | v1.1 | v2.0 -

The ATLAS Ontology has been implemented to describe the metadata of selected pilot projects and their related entities. This effort has resulted in a Knowledge Graph, which is currently available as a compressed folder containing Turtle XML serializations. Additionally, some demo files have been curated to illustrate the structure of the main entities within this model.

CLEF: v3.0 | v3.1 -

CLEF is a web application for data entry that facilitates users in data collection and visualisation. In DH Atlas, we use CLEF to collect data and descriptions about Digital Humanities projects devoted to the Italian Cultural Heritage. CLEF leverages the power of Linked Open Data to ensure data quality, concept disambiguation, fair reuse, and reconciliation with external data sources. The latest version introduces a number of features to facilitate knowledge extraction from pilot projects, enabling scholars to describe them without creating new data from scratch. With support for SPARQL/API queries and other intuitive extraction methods, CLEF enables users of all skill levels to access and retrieve (meta)data of research outcomes from various sources, including static files. Additionally, advanced templating options enhance the platform's flexibility to handle complex data models like the ATLAS one. Key updates include the Intermediate Templates functionality, which allows users to combine multiple Templates to simultaneuosly create related Records, and the capability to assign multiple classes and subclasses to catalogued resources. CLEF will also host the final catalogue of DH projects offering diverse ways to explore and engage with the collected data through enhanced visualisation strategies.

The ATLAS White Book: v1.0 | v1.1 | v1.2 -

The whitebook is one of the main outcomes of the ATLAS project. It serves two purposes: first, to present the ATLAS catalogue and its underlying data model; second, to provide guidelines and best practices for producing "FAIR" (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) scholarly outputs in Digital Humanities and enhancing Italian digital cultural heritage. The whitebook is aimed at future catalogue curators and scholars seeking to improve the FAIRness of their research products. The whitebook is introduced by the review of the state of the art and the presentation of the goals and methodologies of the ATLAS project. The first chapter focuses on the evaluation of the research products used as pilots for designing the ATLAS data model, and on the guidelines for producing FAIR data. The ATLAS data model is presented in detail in the second chapter, while the catalogue with the knowledge extraction systems and web services are described in the third chapter.

The ATLAS Guidelines: v1.0 -

The ATLAS Guidelines provide comprehensive best practices for producing research outputs in the Digital Humanities that are FAIR—Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. They offer practical advice for scholars, researchers, and institutions on how to plan, document, publish, and preserve digital resources in sustainable and interoperable ways. Drawing on established international recommendations, the guidelines focus on five main types of Digital Humanities outputs: digital scholarly editions, text collections, software tools, ontologies, and linked open data. By promoting transparency, reusability, and methodological rigor, the ATLAS Guidelines aim to foster high-quality digital scholarship and enhance the visibility of Italian Digital Cultural Heritage.

The Edition Types Vocabulary (ETV): v1.0 -

The Edition Types Vocabulary is a knowledge organization system designed to provide a structured and authoritative set of terms for describing various types of textual criticism products, particularly scholarly editions. It covers a broad spectrum of edition types—such as critical, diplomatic, genetic, and facsimile editions—offering standardized, persistent labels and curated references to support consistent classification and description of editorial practices in textual scholarship.

The ATLAS REST API: v1.0 -

The ATLAS project team has developed RESTful APIs to access the knowledge graph, ensuring machine actionability and encouraging data reuse. These APIs were created using RAMOSE (Restful API Manager Over SPARQL Endpoints) and serve as a key interoperability layer, allowing third-party applications to access and reuse the graph’s contents in real time.

The ATLAS OAI-PMH Publisher: v1.0 -

The OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) publisher enables automated harvesting of metadata from the ATLAS Knowledge Graph, allowing integration with the OpenAIRE Research Graph. It supports interoperability, semantic linking of research outputs, compliance with Open Access policies, and enhanced visibility, discoverability, and monitoring of Italian Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage resources.

Sebastiano Giacomini, Chiara Martignao, Giorgia Rubin, Alessia Bardi, Marina Buzzoni, Marilena Daquino, Riccardo Del Gratta, Angelo Mario Del Grosso, Franz Fischer, Roberto Rosselli Del Turco, Francesca Tomasi. 2025. "ATLAS: A Knowledge Graph to enhance the findability of International Scholarly Research on the Italian Digital Cultural Heritage." Umanistica Digitale. Under reivew.

Sebastiano Giacomini, Marilena Daquino, Francesca Tomasi, Laurent Antoine Fintoni. 2025. "CLEF 2.0. Solutions for Native Linked Data Cataloguing of Italian Digital Cultural Heritage." JLIS.it 16:1. DOI: 10.36253/jlis.it-611. [online]

Digital Culture Seminar. [event overview]

Dr. Chiara Martignano (UNIVE) e Giorgia Rubin (CNR) presented the ATLAS project, focusing on the ontology underlying the knowledge graph and the web application for collaborative exploration and editing. They also introduced the ATLAS guidelines, designed to support the creation of FAIR research products in Digital Humanities, with particular reference to digital critical editions, text collections, software tools, ontologies, and linked data datasets. The seminar, held at the Polo Fibonacci (University of Pisa) on 1 October 2025, gathered students and scholars from the Digital Humanities community.

The ATLAS of Italian Digital Humanities: a dynamic knowledge graph of digital scholarly research on Italian Cultural Heritage. [event overview]

Held in Venice (22 September 2025), this final workshop of the DH-ATLAS project provided a forum for presenting and assessing the project’s outcomes, and for discussing future research directions. The event featured interactive sessions and evaluation activities involving researchers and MA/PhD students, who contributed to reflecting on the sustainability and further development of an open research infrastructure dedicated to Italian Cultural Heritage.

Accessing Digital Humanities Research on the Cultural Heritage. [event overview]

The workshop, held in Bologna (26 March 2025), focused on strategies and models for improving access to Digital Humanities research data. It included presentations on best practices and infrastructures for Open Access scholarly metadata, as well as a datathon where experts, researchers, and PhD students collaboratively extended the DH-ATLAS knowledge graph by describing research products and projects related to Italian Cultural Heritage.

Kick-off meeting. [program]

All research units met on 1 December 2023 in Bologna to discuss project objectives, timeline, and research solutions to be reused or developed to create the DH Atlas.

AIUCD Conference 2025. [program; paper; proceedings]

Dr. Chiara Martignano (UNIVE) and Giorgia Rubin (CNR) presented results of the first year, focusing on the practices and methodological framework supporting the development of the ATLAS ontology and the knowledge graph. The Italian National Conference of Digital Humanities (AIUCD 2025), was held in Verona, 11-13 June 2025.

WOOC 2025 Conference. [program; paper; proceedings]

Sebastiano Giacomini (UNIBO) presented the ATLAS platform in the context of preserving and accessing Digital Humanities research data, highlighting the role of the ontology and the knowledge graph in enhancing metadata, discovery, and reusability of research on Italian Digital Cultural Heritage. The Workshop on Open Citations and Open Scholarly Metadata, hosted by the University of Bologna, 28-29 May 2025, gathers researchers, scholarly publishers, funders, policy makers, institutions, and open citations advocates, interested in the widespread adoption of practises for creation, sharing, reuse and improvement of open scholarly metadata

IRCDL 2025 Conference. [program]

Giorgia Rubin (CNR) and Sebastiano Giacomini (UNIBO) presented results of the first year: the ATLAS ontology, our methodoloy, the knowledge graph, and the new features of CLEF. The conference, hosted by the University of Udine, 20-21 February 2025, gathers scholars from the Digital Libraries and Digital Humanities communities.

DARIAH Conference. [abstract]

We presented the DH Atlas project to the broad European DH community at the DARIAH annual event, in Lisbon, 18-21 June 2024.

AIUCD Conference 2024. [abstract; poster; proceedings]

Our researchers presented a poster on the DH Atlas project at the Italian National Conference of Digital Humanities, which was held in Catania, 28-30 May 2024.