Use, Reuse and Valorisation: A Web App for Italian Cultural Heritage

In the last years, particularly during and after the pandemic, the digital ecosystems for digitalized and digitized heritage and their contributors have increased considerably, making available huge amounts of miscellaneous data (Owens, Padilla 2020, Barbuti 2019). The aim of this contribution is to present an ongoing PON doctoral research project whose goal is to create a web application for the valorization of the Italian Cultural Heritage within the digital paradigm, starting from large repositories and narrowing down the field in order to reuse and enhance existing resources. The benefits deriving from its implementation will be first and foremost the conservation and further dissemination of the Italian CH, with a special consideration for the reuse of existing data and the adoption of digital standards, in order to valorize and promote the work of other institutions and individuals. In fact, the online availability of resources is not enough. They need to be integrated in formally coherent, supplementable and reusable representations (Gagliardi/Guarino 2021). Moreover, the application will be designed as to be intuitive, adaptable to different audiences and purposes. The platform retrieves existing resources from online aggregators through APIs (so far calls for Europeana, Zenodo and GitHub have been developed and the connection to a SPARQL endpoint on the Germanic CH in Italy – in development as another PON project – is in progress), extracts a set of metadata and formats them according to the DCMI in order to create searchable and interoperable data. It will be provided with a visualization tool and an annotator so as to let the user the possibility to enrich the data. This project is addressed to a varied audience which shares the purpose to search the Italian CH in the digital ecosystem. Simple queries on platforms like Europeana usually give back thousands of results, which might be confusing for the user and not advantageous for the research. However, through this platform, users can work on a restricted subset. For example, a scholar can interrogate the ontology related to the aforementioned SPARQL endpoint and enrich the data thanks to the annotator or access the APIs, XML files and IIIFs when the original sources provide them. On the other hand, the tourist could look for details on a specific topic of her/his interest, see images about related items and read information about them. The platform will be open and easy to use. The user-friendly interface will be similar to the one visible on the demo of Muruca and the annotation tool will be Pundit, both of which will be integrated in the platform with their developers at Net7, a non-academic partner institution which operates in the DH field and is collaborating on this project. For the visualization, the software Edition Visualization Technology will be integrated. The project is in line with the Italian National Digitalization Plan, whose purpose is to create a cultural ecosystem based on digital methods in order to strengthen existing digitalization projects and offer public policies and rules so as to operate in a common vision.