Matteo Abrate

GeoMemories—A Platform for Visualizing Historical, Environmental and Geospatial Changes in the Italian Landscape

The GeoMemories project aims at publishing on the Web and digitally preserving historical aerial photographs that are currently stored in physical form within the archives of the Aerofototeca Nazionale in Rome. We describe a system, available at http://www.geomemories.org, that lets users visualize the evolution of the Italian landscape throughout the last century. The Web portal allows comparison of recent satellite imagery with several layers of historical maps, obtained from the aerial photos through a complex workflow that merges them together. We present several case studies carried out in collaboration with geologists, historians and archaeologists, that illustrate the great potential of our system in different research fields. Experiments and advances in image processing technologies are envisaged as a key factor in solving the inherent issue of vast amounts of manual work, from georeferencing to mosaicking to analysis.

Text Encoder and Annotator: An All-in-one Editor for Transcribing and Annotating Manuscripts with RDF

In the context of the digitization of manuscripts, transcription and annotation are often distinct, sequential steps. This could lead to difficulties in improving the transcribed text when annotations have already been defined. In order to avoid this, we devised an approach which merges the two steps into the same process. Text Encoder and Annotator (TEA) is a prototype application embracing this concept. TEA is based on a lightweight language syntax which annotates text using Semantic Web technologies. Our approach is currently being developed within the Clavius on the Web project, devoted to studying the manuscripts of Christophorus Clavius, an influential 16th century mathematician and astronomer.

ASIA - An Investigation Platform for Exploiting Open Source Information in the Fight Against Tax Evasion

Tax evasion is a widespread phenomenon confirmed by numerous European and American reports. To contrast it, governments already adopt software solutions that support tax inspectors in their investigations. However, the currently existing systems do not normally take advantage of the constant stream of data published on the Web. Instead, the ASIA project aims to prove the effectiveness of combining this kind of open source information with official data contained in Public Administration archives to fight tax evasion. Our prototype platform deals with two cases of investigation, people and businesses. Public officers have been involved throughout the project, and took part in a preliminary test phase which showed very promising results.

The Clavius on the Web Project: Digitization, Annotation and Visualization of Early Modern Manuscripts

This paper describes the full procedure adopted in the context of the Clavius on the Web project, which aims to help Web users to appraise the importance of specific manuscripts by going beyond their digital reproduction. The proposed approach is based on the multilayered explication of linguistic, lexical and semantic data representing the innermost nature of the analyzed manuscripts. The final purpose of the project is to gather and display the results of the three layers of analysis through interactive visualization techniques and export them as Linked Data. All the analyses rely on the XML/TEI encoding of the text, followed by a CTS-based tokenization. As a working example for this paper, the analysis of a portion of a manuscript provided by Historical Archives of the Pontifical Gregorian University will be illustrated. The text is a letter written in Latin and sent by Botvitus Nericius to Christophorus Clavius in 1598 from Madrid.