A framework for ontological description of archaeological scientific publications

This paper describes the results of the first step in the development of a comprehensive project aimed at realizing a portal and a set of advanced services supporting the sharing of knowledge about Prehistory and Protohistory in the Italian context. In particular, one of these services is represented by a digital library, whose entries (i.e. bibliographic descriptions of publications) will be ontologically described. The paper introduces the approach that was adopted to support the acquisition and representation of ontological knowledge. The software modules that were developed to support these phases allow on one hand the management of the assertional component of the ontology, and on the other the association of the related entities to digital library contents. These descriptions will be exploited to support effective strategies for bibliographic information retrieval as well as semantic navigation schemes through the recommendation of contents related to the currently viewed one.