Ontologies and historical archives: A way to tell new stories

Historical documentary heritage has a high potential for supporting citizens’ awareness of their culture and identity. However, to exploit this potential, access tools are needed, which integrate data from heterogeneous sources and provide an effective user interaction. Moreover, historical archives can become a useful and attractive cultural resource, if they are exploited in popular contexts, such as education and tourism: Innovative ICT-based applications can employ documents, pictures, etc. to guide students and tourists in the discovery of interesting stories, connecting the present to the past, and providing a larger audience with a “live” access to original cultural heritage resources. In particular, we claim that this scenario can be enabled by providing ICT tools with a rich semantic layer, based on computational ontologies, in which the notions of event and role play a major role. Such a semantic layer can be further enriched by exploiting resources available in the Linked Open Data cloud.