Aim & Scope

Dear colleagues,
We regretfully announce the cancellation of SWODCH 2020 edition and we are already working on its 2021 edition. We have waited until now, in the hope that the situation could evolve in a positive way, but the uncertainties about the evolution of the COVID-19 demonstrate that it will not be possible to enjoy the chance to meet in person colleagues to share research and scholarly experiences this year.
We thank the authors and committee members for their understanding, and we hope this delay will allow all of us to have a great edition in 2021!

The International Joint Workshop on “Semantic Web and Ontology Design for Cultural Heritage” (SWODCH 2020) is the association of the 2nd edition of WODHSA (http://www.loa.istc.cnr.it/WODHSA/index.php/cfp/) and the 4th edition of SW4CH (https://sw4ch2018.ensma.fr/). It is also in continuation with the 1st edition of ODOCH (http://odoch19.uniroma1.it/odoch19/odoch19) and the special issue of the Semantic Web Journal on “Semantic Web for Cultural Heritage” (www.semantic-web-journal.net/blog/special-issue-semantic-web-cultural-heritage).

The purpose of WODHSA is to gather original research work about both application and foundational issues emerging from the design of conceptual models, ontologies, and Semantic Web technologies for the Digital Humanities (DH). In fact, a plethora of heterogeneous and multi-format data currently available in the Digital Humanities domain asks for principled methodologies and technologies to semantically characterize, integrate, and reason on data and data models for analysis, visualization, retrieval, and other purposes. We are also interested in studies about the philosophical and social analysis of DH data and knowledge representation models. For instance, ontologies for the DH often require to take into account the historical and social dimensions of data. The research question is how to explicitly represent these dimensions in a way that is transparent and accessible to both humans and machines.
We believe that making both modellers and users aware of the modelling choices laying behind models and applications, as well as studying the background theories of such modelling choices, enhance the transparency and reliability of computational resources, and therefore help users in better understanding and trusting them.

The aim of SW4CH is to bring together stakeholders from various scientific fields, Computer Scientists, Data Scientists and Digital Humanists, involved in the development or deployment of Semantic Web solutions for Cultural Heritage. Cultural Heritage data is typically made available in diverse languages and formats. Knowledge representation can play an important role in making such resources mutually interoperable, so that it can be presented, linked and searched in a harmonised way. Early solutions were based on the syntactic/structural level of data, without leveraging the rich semantic structures underlying the content. Nowadays, institutions bring their data to the Semantic Web level, so the tasks of integrating, sharing, analysing and visualising data are to be conceived in this new and very rich framework.

The overall goal of SWODCH 2020 is to provide a scientific forum where scholars and stakeholders will have the opportunity to exchange ideas, experiences, and analyses, while presenting realisations and outcomes of relevant projects and discussing the related challenges.