Mapping the Knowledge of Dante Commentaries in the Digital Context: A Web Ontology Approach

Abstract

With digital repositories and databases available since the 1990s, Dante scholarship has always been at the forefront of the digital humanities and the digitization of medieval texts and manuscripts. However, the amount of information available about such aspects is imposing, and its location subject to the extreme dispersion of traditional scholarly publications: commentaries first but also academic journals, miscellanies, and so forth. Rather than being based on traditional word searches, a true advancement of knowledge needs to overcome the rigidity of text-based queries (and in-line markup embedded in text). Such paramount evolution is now made possible by the Semantic Web, an extension of the current web by description standards that help machines to understand and connect the information already available on the web. To achieve this, the latter is mapped using formal description and classification patterns, called ontologies. Ontologies are a key factor in managing meaningful search/data extraction, publishing relevant results on the web, search existing web resources, and offering answers to more sophisticated queries. Due to its vastness and complexity, Dante scholarship has calls for an ontology-based mapping, and specific tools have been designed to express the most difficult and articulate aspects of Dante’s literary production, such as its use of biblical, classical, and medieval sources. This paper aims to introduce the aims and scope of a new digital library of Dante commentaries, built according to the aforementioned standards and aiming to refine and extend the ontologies developed for Dante’s minor works to the more complex world of the Commedia.