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Medieval manuscript descriptions and the Semantic Web: analysing the impact of CIDOC CRM on Italian codicological-paleographical data

Semantic Web technologies provide the ability to more effectively connect and integrate structured data by disclosing their intended meaning and therefore making explicit their description, context and provenance. Thanks to their nature, Semantic Web technologies have produced insights into the challenges associated with standardizing metadata for manuscripts. Scholars depend on highly specific catalogue records in order to understand a manuscript and raise research questions which take into account either its physicality or its nature of “evidence for all aspects of life in the medieval period” [Burrows 2011]. However, the heterogeneity of codicological-paleographical records in terms of metadata and terminology is weakening the integration and interoperability within the community. Ontologies in particular have been evaluated as a clever approach towards a better communication. The employment of knowledge representation in the field of medieval manuscript descriptions is still narrow, though. Against the state of the art, this paper attempts to add some evidence: it analyses the impact of a top-level ontology designed for modelling cultural objects, namely CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model, on a set of fifteen Italian manuscript descriptions encoded in TEI standard using the online platform ManusOnLine. In this case study, the semantics underlying the selected TEI XML-encoded manuscript descriptions were visually explored according to a subset of CIDOC CRM’s classes and properties. In doing so, the process of the creation of a manuscript was split and analysed in its internal phases in accordance with the CIDOC CRM event-modelling principle. Within the dataset, tags as <date> and <name> are used sporadically to encode factual information; however, this case study shows that events and relations can be generally deduced from the XML structure of a manuscript description, although they are not expressively identified. Overall, the analysis demonstrates that CIDOC CRM can represent a valuable aid to overcome manuscripts-related issues — i.e. granularity, contradictory knowledge and terminology — and potentially create an interlinked data platform which could greatly enhance the study of human culture.