Digital Collections of Semantically Annotated Cultural Heritage Texts

Abstract

Free text is a class of information that comprises a wide range of cultural heritage documents,
usually very difficult to process with traditional forms and relational databases. To this class
belong various types of documents, (e.g. texts from ancient sources, comments or technical notes
produced by cultural heritage experts, excavation diaries written during archaeological excavation
activity) showing different schemas and multiple ways of content organisation and presentation.
The creation of coherent archives to store the content of these documents in a meaningful way
implies a totally different point of view, where the main focus is on the text and its meaning,
rather than on the structure of its container (e.g. the tables of a database or the fields of a form).
This document-centric approach provides a way of preserving the integrity of the original
documents without sacrificing efficient information retrieval.