Using ontologies as a faceted browsing for heterogeneous cultural heritage collections

In this paper we present a project regarding the possible use of multi- ple and interconnected OWL ontologies (GO!, HiCo, and Proles) in order to explore the semantic content of heterogeneous digital collections (a digital li- brary, a full-text scholarly edition, and a relational database) in the cultural her- itage domain (Geolat, Vespasiano da Bisticci Letters, and Zeri photo archive). The aim is to discover knowledge by revealing, through facets, possible latent connections – or even contradictory statements – between data, moving from person, places and dates in an event-centric dimension determined by a context- oriented perspective.