DanteSources: a Digital Library for Studying Dante Alighieri’s Primary Sources

Abstract

We present DanteSources, a focused Digital Library that aims at building innovative services supporting scholars in creating, evolving and consulting a digital encyclopaedia of Dante Alighieri’s works. DanteSources is endowed with Web services that allow extracting and visualizing data about Dante Alighieri’s primary sources, i.e. other authors’ works which Dante referred to in his own works. The heart of the digital library is a knowledge base built on an ontology that was developed in the RDF/S language, representing Dante’s works and the knowledge about them, extracted from some authoritative commentaries. Finally, on top of this graph, we developed DanteSources, which allows users to extract and display the knowledge stored in the knowledge base in the form of charts and tables. The methodology and the tool we developed are easily reusable to represent the knowledge about primary sources of other authors of the Italian or the international literature.