A preliminary study on the semantic representation of the notes to Dante Alighieri's Convivio

Abstract

We present a study on the semantic representation of the knowledge embedded in the notes to Convivio, a philosophical essay composed by Dante Alighieri. The notes were produced by an Italian scholar in structured text format. First, we analyzed the content of the document annotated by the scholar and on this basis we created an underlying high-level UML model that plays the role of an initial conceptualization. In the second step, we tried to identify terms belonging to vocabularies used in the Digital Libraries domain, which could be used for specifying the UML conceptualization. To this end, we investigated several existing ontologies, and we chose the terms that we considered useful to represent our knowledge. In order to describe all the knowledge embedded in the notes, we added classes and properties. Finally, we built a RDF graph that represents the semantics of the notes.