Cultural Sites in Italy

Is it possible to explore Italian cultural sites in LOD?

dati.beniculturali.it is a project which aims at collecting and making accessible italian cultural data available in linked open data (LOD).

Our project aims at exploring two classes which are accessible through dati.beniculturali.it:

  • Cultural Events: described through the ontology CIS from Culture-ON
  • Cultural Properties: described through the ontology Arco.

in order to compare the sites which hosted cultural events with the institutes that host or are themselves cultural properties.

You can see at the side how many subjects have type "cis:CulturalEvent and how many have the type "arco:CulturalPropery" in our dataset

The overall numbers

Cultural
Events

Cultural Properties

Are those data representative of the cultural sites in Italy?

In order to compare the sites which hosted cultural events and the sites which host cultural institution, we provide a visualization on map.

Cultural Events' cities

Cultural Properties' cities

Did you note anything strange?

Since more cultural proprety are hosted in the same site, even if the numbers of cultural properties' elements is higher, the map tell another story.

The gaps in the dataset

As the maps show, while the events have a quite equal distribution all over the country, only few cultural properties' institutes are present in the dataset.

However, if we look deeper at our data, neither the events can be considered representative of the reality.

The events don't have just a geographical collocation, but also a temporal one. Below we can have a look at the temporal distribution of all the cultural events in the dataset.

Region-sites CE

Region-sites CP

Scale down: look at regional data

In order to try to answer our reserach question we scaled down the area of interest, looking at the distribution of data inside the different regions.

As the graph shows the region with the higher number of cultural events is Lazio, while the region with the higher number of cultural properties' institutes is Toscana.

However, Lazio does not have any data about cultural institute, so we will proceede analyzing Tuscany.

Tuscany's cities

Since a lot of cities had few events, we put a threshold of 4 to show the results.

The city which has both more cultural institutes and more cultural events'sites is Florence, finally we can try to compare cultural institutes' sites and cultural events' sites.

Florence Cultural Events' sites and Cultural Properties' Sites comparison

Even if not all the sites seem to coincide, it emerges from the map that there are some nodal points in which both cultural events and cultural institutes converge.

Credits

This project has been developed as final assessment for the course "Information Visualization", held by Prof. Daquino at MA "Digital Humanities and Digital Knowledge" of University of Bologna.

Team members

The data come from dati.beniculturali.it, enriched with dbPedia.