Proceedings of the First International Workshop Semantic Web for Scientific Heritage at the 12th ESWC 2015 Conference

International audienceThe first International Workshop on Semantic Web for Scientific Heritage was held in conjunction with the 12th ESWC 2015 Conference on June 1, in Portoroz, Slovenia and provided a leading international and interdisciplinary forum for disseminating the latest research in the field of Semantic Web for the preservation and exploitation of our scientific heritage, the study of the history of ideas and their transmission. Classicists and historians are interested in developing textual databases, in order to gather and explore large amounts of primary source materials. For a long time, they mainly focused on text digitization and markup. They only recently decided to try to explore the possibility of transferring some analytical processes they previously thought incompatible with automation to knowledge engineering systems, thus taking advantage of the growing set of tools and techniques based on the languages and standards of the semantic Web, such as linked data, ontologies, and automated reasoning. The iconographic data, which are also relevant in history of science and arise similar problematic could be addressed as well and offer suggestive insights for a global methodology for diverse media. On the other hand, Semantic Web researchers are willing to take up more ambitious challenges than those arising in the native context of the Web in terms of anthropological complexity, addressing meta-semantic problems of flexible, pluralist or evolutionary ontologies, sources heterogeneity, hermeneutic and rhetoric dimensions. Thus the opportunity for a fruitful encounter of knowledge engineers with computer-savvy historians and classicists has come. This encounter may be inscribed within the more general context of digital humanities, a research area at the intersection of computing and the humanities disciplines which is gaining an ever-increasing momentum and where the Linked Open Data is playing an increasingly prominent role