Improving Access To and Reuse of Semantic Artefacts with Skosmos: the /DH.arc Vocabularies Case

Abstract

Over the past two decades, semantic artefacts, machine-actionable formalizations of conceptualizations that enable sharing and reuse by both humans and machines, have become increasingly important within the Digital Humanities, enabled by Semantic Web standards and reinforced by FAIR Data Principles. These artefacts hold a special importance because they are both instrumental to achieving FAIR-ness in research data and are themselves research objects that should be FAIR. However, in practice, the latter is often overlooked, making them difficult to discover, share, and reuse. To address this gap, we present /DH.arc Vocabularies, a repository developed to improve the visibility and FAIR-ness of semantic artefacts produced by the Digital Humanities Advanced Research Centre at the University of Bologna. In this article, we define semantic artefacts and offer an overview of their evolution and importance before reviewing related work and existing technology; we then move on to an overview of the repository, detailing why Skosmos, an open-source browser built on the SKOS data model, was chosen and how it is implemented both in terms of technical production and publication; after this we look more closely at an overlaying approach we have adopted that allows for the publication and browsing of ontologies written in OWL, something we believe represents a novel application of Skosmos in the cultural heritage and DH contexts; lastly we conclude by looking at how our experience offers an example of how even modest institutional resources, when strategically deployed, can support meaningful infrastructure that benefits both individual institutions and the broader DH community.