DOCUMENTATION

The project

The aim of the project is to extract knowledge from Divina Commedia of Dante. In particular we have chosen to examine Inferno, Canto V and to convert knowledge into a Link Open Data enviroment. DIVO (Dante Inferno V Ontology) is a specific ontology for the analysis of the Divina Commedia. It is populated with the data of Canto V, but it can be used to analyze all the other Canti. We chose this particular Canto because it is rich in characters and places that can be well connected to other information and literary works, in order to give an idea of the immensity of the world around Divina Commedia. For the collection of data we have based our research on the following editions:

• Dante Alighieri, La Divina Commedia. Inferno a cura di Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi, Mondadori, Milano 2005.
• Dante Alighieri, Commedia. Inferno, a cura di: Giorgio Inglese, Carrocci Ediotore, Roma, edizione 2016.
• Dante Alighieri, Divina Commedia, Inferno. Introduzione al poema, commento e letture di Emilio Pasquini e Antonio Quaglio. 1° edizione, 1988 – Garzanti Editore s.p.a., Milano.
• Dante Alighieri, La Divina Commedia. Inferno a cura di Natalino Sapegno, Rcs scuola, Milano, 2001.

Development of the ontology

For the creation of our ontology we started from the structure of the Divina Commedia. We have therefore created the classes: Cantica, Canto, Line in order to represent the structure of the text. Subsequently, we enriched it with classes covering places and characters related to the entire Divina Commedia’s universe. So we will find the AgentClass and its subclasses to define the characters gravitating around the Canto, as well as the Place class to classify places. In addition to this type of analysis, we have taken into consideration the comments of four Dantists. Therefore we have included in the ontology some classes that refer to this aspect and all the information that comes from it, to be able to connect them to the text. In addition, we have created a class that hosts all the literary works, their authors and specific quotations to which Dante refers in Canto V. Our ontology is thus divided into three "macro" classes, Agent, LiteraryElement and Place. In this way it will be possibile to re-use our ontology by starting from a single Canto, no matter of the choosen Cantica.

Technical choices

During the development of ontology, specifically in the phase of creating individuals, we came across a number of issues of categorization, for example:

• Dante is both the author of the Divina Commedia and the protagonist of the work. The character of Dante is aware that he is the author, as can be read from the following lines:

  O muse, o alto ingegno, or m’aiutate;
  o mente che scrivesti ciò ch’io vidi,
  qui si parrà la tua nobilitate.

  (Inf II 7-9)

  In this case we decided to include Dante in the general category Agent so as not to assign him a specific category that would limit him to that single one.

• As regard God we wondered if he/she should be considered a fictional character or a real one. The choice of category depends on the interpretations that each person gives to God. To respect the different positions that may exist, we have preferred to place God under the general category Agent, together with Dante.

• Two other problems that we have faced are the representation of each character that Dante gives through writing, and the differentiation between character and soul. In fact, in his journey Dante meets different souls that correspond to the souls of characters, in some cases really existed and in others of fantasy. Dante's characters are the representation that he gives through writing and that are inspired by real/fictional characters, but not identifiable with the characters themselves. For example: Dante meets the soul of Achille that is among the souls of the "Lussuriosi". The Dantesque Achille is obviously not the same as described by Homer. Dante also meets the souls of really existed characters, for example that of Francesca and Paolo. In these cases there are two levels of differentiation: first, Dante meets the soul of the characters and not the physical people who really existed, and also Dante represents the characters in a completely subjective way.