Alessandro Adamou

Littoral zones are not merely boundaries between land and water; they are dynamic bridges and buffers, fundamentally shaped by shifting environmental forces. The intangible cultural heritage embedded within these coastal zones (encompassing generational practices of resilience, navigation, and ecological adaptation) is highly vulnerable to loss. Current information systems are poorly equipped to safeguard these living practices. Historically grounded in "urban ontologies," digital architectures inherently favour stability, permanent landmarks, and predictable spatial control. This paper presents a gap analysis examining how existing information systems, from geo-spatial hypermedia to immersive media, fail to capture the fluid, cyclical, and seasonally contingent nature of littoral heritage. By contrasting the performative, ultra-local realities of the coast against the static nature of traditional archives, we outline the structural limitations of current digitisation efforts. Finally, we propose conceptual foundations for future interactive architectures capable of supporting the active transmission, continuous evolution, and structural fluidity required to truly preserve littoral knowledge.

In response to a perceived systemic information crisis being experienced by the contemporary HTTP-based Web, a growing informal counter-movement — the Small Web, or smolweb — advocates for minimalist, content-centric protocols such as Gemini, Spartan, and Nex as deliberate alternatives to the dispersiveness of the modern Web. This paper argues that the Small Web represents a fertile and largely unexplored environment for reintroducing Linked Data and the Semantic Web natively, with the potential to circumvent the architectural flaws that perpetuate the prevailing information crisis. To this end, we derive a core contract establishing the minimal conventions a Linked Data system must observe to operate over smolweb transports, alongside additional capabilities exposed by individual protocol bindings. We further introduce Gemtext-LD, a formally specified serialisation of RDF triples into Gemtext — the sole document format common to all the protocols considered. Finally, we present a reference implementation comprising a Gemtext-LD library and Chaykin, a multi-protocol Linked Data server and proxy. This work constitutes a first step toward a Small Web of Data, and opens research directions including SPARQL integration and a principled comparison with the Linked Data Platform.

This paper presents a semantic hypermedia framework for documenting and interpreting cultural heritage artifacts, with particular attention to decontextualized and refunctionalized architectural components, through curated integration of heterogeneous sources. Built on Linked Open Data principles, it addresses two key challenges: mediating semantic complexity for domain experts, and ensuring data quality when integrating external resources. Knowledge patterns map CIDOC-CRM to a project-specific model aligned with scholarly practice, while external datasets—such as the Getty vocabularies, OpenStreetMap, Zotero, and Iconclass—are incorporated through a graded model of semantic commitment, distinguishing authority alignment, partial reuse, and full ontology adoption. External information is materialized in a knowledge graph to ensure reproducibility and long-term accessibility. By framing external linking and semantic mediation as a hypermedia design problem, the approach shows how controlled integration can support navigation, enrichment, and scholarly reuse of cultural heritage data while preserving curatorial control. We contribute a practical model for dataset curation, semantic mediation, and graph-based knowledge representation in cultural heritage hypermedia systems, developed through the design and implementation of a case study.

This paper presents a customized and sustainable workflow for digital scholarly publications in the humanities that aims to overcome the difficulties of transitioning from traditional fixed formats to those that require fluid layout and structure, such as ePub, (X)HTML or XML. While the process fits well within the humanities tradition and takes into account the specificities of the humanities that distinguish them from the hard sciences, such as extended footnotes and non-DOI references, it can be easily adapted to publications in different fields. The paper outlines the various challenges encountered in the digital publication process, including the transformation of text documents into JATS XML and the process of uploading to OJS (Open Journal System). It describes our attempts to streamline the steps and provide solutions that fit within the capacity of limited budgets without compromising the content and structure of the publications. The paper concludes with an evaluation of the proposed workflow and outlines future improvements to increase its efficiency.

Modelling the knowledge behind human experiences is a complex process: it should take into account, among others, the activities performed, human observations and the documentation of the evidence. To represent this knowledge in a declarative way means to support data interoperability in the context of cultural heritage artefacts, as linked datasets on experience documentation have started to appear. With this objective in mind, we describe a study based on an ontology design pattern for modelling experiences through observations, which are considered indirect evidence of a mental process (i.e., the experience). This pattern highlights the structural differences between types of experiential documentation, such as diaries and social media, providing a guideline for the comparability between different domains and for supporting the construction of heterogeneous datasets based on an epistemic compatibility. We have performed not only a formal evaluation over the pattern but also an assessment through a series of case studies. This approach includes (a) the analysis of interoperability among two case studies (reading through social media and historical sources); (b) the development of an ontology for collecting evidences of reading, which reuses the proposed pattern; and (c) the inspection of experience in humanities datasets.