Preserving cultural heritage objects: provenance formalization

Preservation is a composite task, because digital objects are multilevel, stratified, and complex entities. In order to ensure conceptual preservation, the cultural object must be accompanied by the most accurate details about the provenance. With the provenance, in fact, it is possible to attribute paternity to the actions linked to that cultural object, in such a way as to guarantee its reliability. Given the amount of existing information on the Web, there is a need for mechanisms to determine the provenance of the data, in order to guarantee not just the reliability of the information but also the authoritativeness, so that the final user can use it. By translating these principles into ontology, the object is preserved in its conceptual dimension. Two ontologies aimed at the formalization of the provenance (PRoles and HiCO) are then described, which have also been tested on two different projects: a structured collection (a catalog) and a set of unstructured documents (a digital edition)