A formal representation of the divine comedy’s primary sources: The Hypermedia Dante Network ontology

Abstract

Abstract Hypermedia Dante Network (HDN) is a 3-year Italian National Research Project, started in 2020, which aims to enrich the functionalities of the DanteSources Digital Library to efficiently represent knowledge about the primary sources of Dante’s Comedy. DanteSources allows users to retrieve and visualize the list and the distribution of Dante's primary sources that have been identified by recent commentaries of five of Dante’s minor works (i.e. Vita nova, De vulgari eloquentia, Convivio, De Monarchia, and Rime). The digital library is based on a formal ontology expressed in Resource Description Framework Schema (RDFS) language. Based on the DanteSources experience, the HDN project aims to formally represent the primary sources of the Divine Comedy whose identification is based on several commentaries included in the Dartmouth Dante Project corpus. To reach this goal, we restructured and extended the DanteSources ontology to provide a wider and more complete representation of the knowledge concerning the primary sources of the Comedy. In this article, we present the result of this effort, i.e. the HDN ontology. The ontology is expressed in OWL and has as reference ontologies the CIDOC CRM and its extension FRBRoo, including its in-progress reformulation LRMoo. We also briefly describe the semi-automatic tool that will be used by the scholars to populate the ontology.