Alessandro Tommasi


2024

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DigItAnt: a platform for creating, linking and exploiting LOD lexica with heterogeneous resources
Michele Mallia | Michela Bandini | Andrea Bellandi | Francesca Murano | Silvia Piccini | Luca Rigobianco | Alessandro Tommasi | Cesare Zavattari | Mariarosaria Zinzi | Valeria Quochi
Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Linked Data in Linguistics @ LREC-COLING 2024

Over the past few years, the deployment of Linked Open Data (LOD) technologies has witnessed significant advancements across a myriad of sectors, linguistics included. This progression is characterized by an exponential increase in the conversion of resources to adhere to contemporary encoding standards. Such transformations are driven by the objectives outlined in “ecological” methodologies, notably the FAIR data principles, which advocate for the reuse and interoperability of resources. This paper presents the DigItAnt architecture, developed in the context of a national project funded by the Italian Ministry of Research and in the service of a recently started Italian endeavor to realize a federation of infrastructures for the humanities. It details its services, utilities and data types, and shows how it manages to produce, exploit and interlink LLOD and non-LLOD datasets in ways that are meaningful to its intended target disciplinary context, i.e. historical linguistics over epigraphy data. The paper also introduces how DigItAnt services and functionalities will contribute to the empowerment of the H2IOSC Italian infrastructures cluster project, which is devoted to the construction of a nationwide research infrastructure federation for the humanities, and it will possibly contribute to its pilot project towards an authoritative LLOD platform.

2022

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From Inscriptions to Lexica and Back: A Platform for Editing and Linking the Languages of Ancient Italy
Valeria Quochi | Andrea Bellandi | Fahad Khan | Michele Mallia | Francesca Murano | Silvia Piccini | Luca Rigobianco | Alessandro Tommasi | Cesare Zavattari
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages

Available language technology is hardly applicable to scarcely attested ancient languages, yet their digital semantic representation, though challenging, is an asset for the purpose of sharing and preserving existing cultural knowledge. In the context of a project on the languages and cultures of ancient Italy, we took up this challenge. The paper thus describes the development of a user friendly web platform, EpiLexO, for the creation and editing of an integrated system of language resources for ancient fragmentary languages centered on the lexicon, in compliance with current digital humanities and Linked Open Data principles. EpiLexo allows for the editing of lexica with all relevant cross-references: for their linking to their testimonies, as well as to bibliographic information and other (external) resources and common vocabularies. The focus of the current implementation is on the languages of ancient Italy, in particular Oscan, Faliscan, Celtic and Venetic; however, the technological solutions are designed to be general enough to be potentially applicable to different scenarios.