blog  SciGraph 2017-2023.

Feb 2023

Springer Nature retired SciGraph earlier this month. I have been the data architect and then technical lead for this project, so this is post is just a reminder of the great things we did in it. Also, a little rant about the things that weren't that great...

blog  Ontospy version 2.0 released.

Oct 2022

Version 2 of the library includes SHACL support as well as various internal refactoring. Ontospy is an open source Python library and command line tool for working with vocabularies encoded in the RDF family of languages.

blog  OntoSpy v.1.7.4.

Feb 2017

A new version of OntoSpy (1.7.4) is available online. OntoSpy is a lightweight Python library and command line tool for inspecting and visualising vocabularies encoded in the RDF family of languages.

blog  Leipzig Semantics 2016 conference.

Oct 2016

A few weeks ago I attended the Semantics conference in Leipzig, so here's a short report about the event.

blog  Ontospy v. 1.6.7.

Jun 2016

A new and improved version of OntoSpy (1.6.7) is available online. OntoSpy is a lightweight Python library and command line tool for inspecting and visualizing vocabularies encoded in the RDF family of languages.

blog  Towards an ontology for philosophy.

Jun 2015

I enjoyed watching a recent presentation by Barry Smith about ontology engineering and in particular its application in the field of philosophy itself. The presentation was hosted by the InPho team at Indian University, whose ongoing work based on creating an ontological backbone for Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has drawn the attention of many.

blog  Nature.com ontologies portal available online.

Apr 2015

The Nature ontologies portal is new section of the nature.com site that describes our involvement with semantic technologies and also makes available to the wider public several models and datasets as RDF linked data.

blog  Nature.com subject pages available online!.

Jun 2014

Subject pages are pages that aggregate content from across nature.com based on the tagging of that content by NPG subject ontology terms. After six months of work on this project we've finally launched the first release of the site, which is reachable online at http://www.nature.com/subjects. Hooray!

blog  Towards a conceptual model for the domain of sculpture.

Nov 2011

For the next two years I'll be collaborating with the Art of Making project. The project investigates the processes involved in the carving of stone during the Roman period, in particular it aims at analysing them using the insights and understanding Peter Rockwell (son of Norman Rockwell) developed during his lifelong experience as a sculptor. Eventually we will present these results by means of a freely accessible online digital resource that guides users through examples of stone carving. In this post I just wanted to report on the very first discussions I had with the sculpture and art scholars I'm working with, to the purpose of creating a shared model for this domain.

blog  Event: THATcamp Kansas and Digital Humanities Forum.

Sep 2011

The THATcamp Kansas and Digital Humanities Forum happened last week at the Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities, which is part of the University of Kansas in beautiful Lawrence. I had the opportunity to be there and give a talk about some recent stuff I've been working on regarding digital prosopography and computer ontologies, so in this blog post I'm summing up a bit the things that caught my attention while at the conference.

blog  Inspecting an ontology with RDFLib.

Jul 2011

RDFLib (homepage) is a pretty solid and comprehensive rdf-programming kit for Python. In a previous post I already discussed what pythonic options are currently available out there for doing semantic web programming; after some more in depth testing I realized that Rdflib is the most accessible and complete of them all (in fact many of the available libraries are based on Rdflib's APIs). So.. here we go: in this post I'm giving an overview of some of the things you can do with this library.

blog  Python links (and more) 7/2/11.

Feb 2011

This post contains just a collection of various interesting things I ran into in the last couple of weeks... they're organized into three categories: pythonic links, events and conferences, and new online tools. Hope you'll find something of interest!

blog  KR workshop #2: introducing CIDOC-CRM and FRBR-OO.

Aug 2010

This is the second appointment with the knowledge representation seminar we're having at CCH (Kings College, London). If you are in the area and are interested in taking part in this, please drop me an email. We're looking at these topics from the specific perspective of the digital humanities, but even if your take on things is different, we'd love to hear from you!

blog  Knowledge Representation workshop @ CCH.

Jul 2010

Last month or so I started a Knowledge Representation workshop with my colleagues at CCH. The basic idea is to take a broad perspective on the various topics related to KR, and then focus on the digital humanities so to see how these approaches and technologies can be best applied to our domain.

blog  Getting back to the ontological work...

Feb 2010

I'll be working in Osaka for three months on ontologizing a couple of datasets with the help of Riichiro Mizoguchi. This means that I'll have enough time to revise various notions about ontology engineering during this period. Here's a first and fundamental one, regarding the difference between ontologies and data models:

blog  Logic and Ontology.

Jun 2009

I found an interesting article on the SEP this morning, it seemed to me well written and clearly argumented. 'Logic and ontology', by Thomas Hofweber. Defining logic and ontology is not an easy thing - maybe because it is just a truism to say that there is one unifying view of what they they are. Something like physics... it is likely that no physicist would tell you that there is one thing  such as 'the physics', but a range of different approaches and theories which constitute physics as a whole.

blog  Modeling Representations (take 2).

Mar 2007

I wrote something in the last weeks about the difficulties related to the modeling of representations and their contents. So today I just read this article by Stefano Mazzocchi, which basically hints at the same issue, but from an 'RDF perspective'. It's a very interesting article, so I just wanted to quote and comment a few passages

blog  Ontology of Representations.

Mar 2007

It's been three days that I'm struggling with concepts of content, form, representation and so on.. I wonder whether there's a well-formalized theory of representations out there.. the one in DOLCE is a useful design pattern, but I'm still reluctant to say that it is complete (I hope I'll find out to be wrong). Another clever view of the issue can be found in a tutorial by Richiiro Mizoguchi, and this is what this post is about.