In this paper we show that an ontology-based approach can be beneficial for enhancing the access to cultural resources, and in particular historical documents.The paper starts with an overview of our approach, aimed at providing online archival systems with a semantic layer based on Semantic Web standards (OWL 2 and RDF).Two projects are introduced, namely Harlock900 and PRiSMHA, carried out in collaboration with local cultural institutions owning rich historical archives.In particular, the paper describes the computational ontologies supporting the approach, and then focuses on two case studies showing that our framework provides better results if compared with standard access systems.The case studies show the enhancement provided by a semantically rich representation of time intervals and a detailed formal description of events and their participants.

This work is part of two ongoing projects whose main goal is to demonstrate how semantic technologies can support an effective access to historical archives.In this paper we present a full pipeline, from rough texts up to the final user interface, aimed at creating and exploiting such representations.The pipeline is structured in three modules -handling information extraction, semantic representations, and queries -and offers external applications the possibility of accessing, and thus re-using, the output of each module, by providing a tagged text, a SPARQL endpoint, and a RESTful web service.In the paper, we describe the details of a proof-of-concept implementation of the pipeline architecture that focuses on time expressions.Moreover, we present an example application that exploits the pipeline to enable users to access historical documents by searching and browsing events and time specifications, thus demonstrating the effectiveness of an access to historical texts based on a rich semantic representation of their content.

Current e-government initiatives are offering a huge amount of information about available services, which tends to overload citizens, who are often "lost". Intelligent Web-based portals represent a possible solution to this problem, by providing an effective and user-friendly access to online information and service descriptions. In particular, this paper proposes an approach based on formal ontologies and shows how they can provide a great enhancement in this direction. Formal semantic knowledge, in fact, enables the exploitation of reasoning mechanisms to understand users goals and provide them with information and services satisfying their needs. The proposed approach has been tested on a set of services provided by a local Italian Public Administration and results are encouraging.

In this paper we present ARNEIS, a framework for building "intelligent" web-based repositories of software solutions, aimed at exploiting Web Services and Semantic Web to support small-to-medium sized enterprises. ARNEIS users are software houses that offer ICT-based solutions for business automation, and small companies that aim at finding software products or services supporting their business activity. The exploitation of OWL-based ontologies enables ARNEIS to apply reasoning techniques to find the possible matches between business requirements and software solutions. Being based on Web Service standards, ARNEIS can be accessed through either a standard web-based user interface, or an external Web Service client. In the paper, we present the framework architecture and a prototype implementation aimed at validating it.