The ATLAS Ontology: v.1 | v.2

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 (v.1)

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.

The ATLAS White Book (v.1)

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.

CLEF (v.3)

CLEF is a web platform 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 enhances 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 Edition Types Vocabulary (ETV) (v.1)

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.

Journal Article

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.

Digital Culture Seminar. [event overview]

Dr. Chiara Martignano (UNIVE) e Dr. 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.

AIUCD Conference 2025. [program; paper; proceedings]

Dr. Chiara Martignano (UNIVE) and Dr. 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]

Dr. 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]

Dr. Giorgia Rubin (CNR) and Dr. 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.

Journal Article [online]

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.

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.

Kick-off meeting [program]

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

The outcomes of the project can be summarised as follows:

- A knowledge graph representative of Italian and Latin heritage, accessible online via dedicated services and preserved in CLARIN. The resource is currently available as a set of Turtle XML files and gathers metadata on the examined pilot projects and their related entities. The data stucture follows the model provided by the ATLAS ontology. [knowledge graph; demo]

- The ATLAS ontology, mapping excerpts of schemas and ontologies reused by pilot projects. This vocabulary has been designed to effectively represent scholarly research projects and their outcomes within the Cultural Heritage domain. It integrates existing and complementary ontological entities from three main standards—Schema.org, DCTerms, and FaBiO (the FRBR-aligned Bibliographic Ontology). [ontology]

- The white book including results of the analysis of the state of the art, good practices to ensure high quality content (in the scope of outlined pilots), and make findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable scholarly data. The current version of this resource is a provisional table of contents and focuses on the initial outcomes of the project: the results of the pilot evaluation, complemented by a set of guidelines for producing FAIR data, and the metadata for the catalographic description of research products. [white book]

- The pilots evaluation, highlighting differences and strategies to cope with mapping knowledge, access and manipulate data belonging to different types of digital artefacts. The mapping file provides an overview of the ATLAS data model, which highlights the main properties adopted by other tools to describe research outcomes and related entities. The resulting set of metadata properties has been implented to analyse the selected pilot projects. [mapping; pilot analysis]

- OpenAIRE Gateway on Italian CH, an access point dedicated to scholarly literature and data relevant to the pilots and beyond.

- ATLAS web application, to explore selected data, ontologies, and tools, and test the compliance of new scholarly projects with the guidelines.