Monuments of L'Aquila as Shared Heritage

Dr. Klaus Werner

The research project undertaken together with Cristiana Pasqualetti of the Department of Human Sciences (Università degli Studi dell’Aquila) and the colleagues Elisa Bastianello and Alessandro Adamou of the BHMPI, originates from the digitization of historical texts about L'Aquila and its territory with the aim of providing the overview of the preserved, lost or displaced historical-artistic and architectural heritage in order to make it shared and accessible to all.
The project is based upon a combination of Wikidata (for the structured description aspect and external data aggregation via statements) and Openstreetmap (for the geospatial aspect) to remain non-proprietary, widely shared and interoperable, and most importantly sustainable. Aggregation is done at various levels, either as a mere link (or deep link) to an external Web resource or as direct access to data in JSON or RDF.  An important aspect is interoperability with advanced Graph and SPARQL technologies that render individual aspects – monuments, people, places – as network.  The geospatial aspect – essential for a cultural map of the territory – is achieved through a connection with the Openstreetmap vector data.

The collected cultural heritage data will be accessible from the BHMPI's internal Knowledge Graph.