Slide of the presentation at the CIMUSET meeting at the ICOM Kyoto 2019 Generale Conference. Session on "Sustainable Heritage"

1. Two examples for an accessible, reusable and interoperable
heritage information using Linked Open Data
From the Portal for Science
Archives in Italy to the New
Collection Catalogue
GIOVANNI CELLA
Project Manager, Heritage Department
National Museum of Science and Technology Leonardo da Vinci of Milan
CIMUSET | ICOM KYOTO 2019
September 4th

2. THE MUSEUM
A BRIEF
PRESENTATION OF THE
MUSEUM I WORK FOR
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3. 2
THE BUILDING
Founded in 1953 is located in an
early 15th century monastery in
the heart of the city of Milan.
With its 50,000 sqm surface it is
currently the largest science and
technology museum in Italy and
among the largest institutions of
its kind in Europe.

4. 3
THE COLLECTIONS
It preserves and valorises a
scientific and technological
heritage of great interest that is
unique in Italy, and a point of
reference on the international
level. Its main collections are
focused on telecommunications,
space and astronautics,
transportation, steel industry and
energy production.

5. 4
THE COLLECTIONS
The Museum also holds art
collections, mainly works from
the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, and the collection of
interpretative models of
drawings by Leonardo da Vinci,
dating from the 1950s
representing the idea of an
integrated interpretation of
culture.

6. 5
SOME NUMBERS
18.000 objects
50.000 books
10 archives with 5.000 archival
units
200.000 photos

7. 6
UNITY
COLLECTIONS
AS A WHOLE
When the Museum was founded, its entire heritage was created in a unitary vision. With
the development of new Museum’s areas and exhibition sections and the renewal and
implementation of its collections, today they are managed as separated groups:
Objects
Documents (Archives)
Books (Library)
But we have a lot of examples of connection between those groups that we need to explore
and study better.

8. 7
RECOGNITION
ABOUT SCIENTIFIC AND
TECHNOLOGICAL HERITAGE
In Italy despite its richness and its long tradition, connected to important history of
scientific research and industrial production, this kind of heritage struggles to be properly
recognised, valued and protected.
Given the richness and breadth of its collections, the Museum is a reference point at
national level for the recognition of the cultural value of the technical-scientific heritage in
Italy.

9. 8
STRATEGY
IMPROVEMENT, NETWORKING
AND SHARING
Improvement: Implementation of contents and advancement of the tools used by the
Museum
Networking: defining the Museum as the main Italian hub for a scientific museums
network working together for the same goal, optimizing resources and increasing the
impact of their projects
Sharing: opening contents with findable and reusable data for other institutions, scholars,
and the public
Today the Museum aims to strengthen this role through a strategy based on:

10. THE PROJECTS
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In collaboration with the National
Academy of Sciences and the
Sapienza University of Rome, in 2016
the Museum applied for and
obtained a funding from the Italian
Ministry of Education, University and
Research, through which it was
possible to launch an important work
in this direction with the two projects:
Portal for the Archives of Science
and Technology in Italy
NCC - New Catalogue of
Collections

11. 10
Compatibility with national and international descriptive standards for archives and
objects
Flexibility in data and tools management
Possibility of managing different types of collections in a unitary way
Data output through LOD
TOOLS
TOOLS FOR THE PROJECT
Given the important technological and web-oriented feature of the projects mentioned
above, the choice was to adopt the XDmas platform, software developed by Regesta.exe,
as it allows to work on key aspects for the realization of projects:

12. THE PORTAL
WEB PORTAL FOR THE
ARCHIVES OF SCIENCE
AND TECHNOLOGY
IN ITALY
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13. 12
Published in February 2019, collects and gives access to over 1.500 archives of scientific
research institutions, and personal papers of scientists, held in over 200 institutes
throughout Italy, with information on content, chronological details, research tools, and
accessibility (www.archividellascienza.org).
The Portal can also be enriched through the interconnection, via LOD, with:
The Italian National Archival System (SAN – Sistema Archivistico Nazionale) and its data
about archival records, creators and institutions that own archives
The open data portal of Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and its data about cultural
institutes or sites
In the next few months, Portal’s data - modelled using OAD ontology - will be available via a
SPARQL endpoint.

14. NCC
NEW COLLECTION
CATALOGUE
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15. 14
THE SYSTEM
In September 2018 the Museum, started
working at the NCC - New Catalogue
Collections. NCC aims to create a unitary
collection management system by providing
a single point of access to its heritage. It
combines the Museum's archival records
already entered in the Portal, with the
catalogue of objects.

16. 15
STANDARDS
The objects are described following the
national standards defined by the ICCD
(Institute of Catalogue and Documentation),
an institute belonging to the Italian Ministry of
Cultural Heritage.
In November 2015, with an update in May
2017, the ICCD released the NTR – Normativa
Trasversale which, while leaving some data
fields dedicated to the specific features of the
different objects, groups together most of the
cataloguing information in a unique data set.

17. 16
LOD
NCC’data will be available via a SPARQL
endpoint, using ArCo (Architecture of
Knowledge) v1.0 ontology network,
developed in a collaborative project that
involves the ICCD and the Institute of
Cognitive Sciences and Technologies of CNR
(Italian National Research Council).
This ontology represents all the information
contained in the NTR and also the information
peculiar to all the typologies of cultural
properties, apart from naturalistic heritage.

18. CONCLUSIONS
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To enrich the archival records
and object catalogue itself
through the connection with the
most common LOD resources
To create a far more accessible
archives and catalogue with
findable and reusable data for
other institutions, scholars, and the
public through LOD
Both projects (the Portal and NCC)
therefore intend:

19. 18
NEXT STEPS
The Museum wishes to continue the work started with the projects described here in the
following directions:
Contribute to mapping of LOD ontologies used in the projects with existing ontologies,
increasing data connection at an international level
Working on data sets interoperability, in order to study and research new connections
inside the collections of the Museum
Developing and sharing thesauri for describing italian scientific and technological heritage
Creating opportunities for reusing Museum heritage data in other digital tools (e.g.
mobile app, video games ...) inside and outside the Museum

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つづくThank you for your attention
CONTACTS
Giovanni Cella
Project Manager | Heritage Department
National Museum of Science and Technology
Leonardo da Vinci of Milan
cella@museoscienza.it
+39.347.1689006
www.museoscienza.org