Ontologies and the cultural heritage. The case of GO!

Geolat - Geography for Latin Literature is a research project, aimed at making accessible a digital library containing the works of Latin literature (from its origins to the end of the Roman Empire) where the geographic knowledge expressed in the Latin texts themselves can be reused. To do so the core of Geolat is the GO! ontology developed ad hoc to describe the geographical knowledge contained in the texts of the library. The semantic annotation of geographical knowledge allows to highlight that the the perception of the space that ancient populations had in their minds is a type of cultural heritage; and thanks to the annotation this type of knowledge can produce new types of cultural objects (interactive maps, editions of texts, etc.). The project is under development at Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici of Università del Piemonte Orientale, and financially supported by Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo.