Idea

"'77: pistole, culi e tette."

-PGR:'70

In the context of the complex, libertarian and creative 1977 Movement, Bologna represented a key spot where political events and disorders, as well as the cultural environment and creative happenings, deeply left their mark on the collective memory of a nation and became the opening of a new season in Italy's history.
On 11th March, after a contestation made outside a Comunione e Liberazione meeting, the police was sent down the streets and the demonstrations degenerated into violence. The overreaction of the police led to the death of the medicine student and exponent of Lotta Continua, Francesco Lorusso, killed in Via Mascarella. In the immediately following day, shocked sympathizers and activists started converging spontaneously in Piazza Verdi and decided to march as protest. Francesco Cossiga, Interior Minister, decided then to send armored vehicles in the city center, accentuating de facto the political conflict.
Radio Alice, a popular free radio that had followed all the events of the previous days by broadcasting live phone calls from students in the streets, was forced to close after the police irrupted in its small studios.
These events provoked several reactions: from the demonstration organized on 16th March by trade unions to ban the riot protests, to the so-called Manifesto against repression signed by Jean-Paul Sartre and other French intellectuals, such as Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.
Nevertheless, at that same time, Bologna was scene for flourishing creativity and cultural production. It was the time of Lucio Dalla's Com'è profondo il mare as well as of Inascoltable, debut album of the fathers of italian comedy punk-rock: the Skiantos. In June, Marina Abramovic and Ulay performed their fundamental Imponderabilia at GAM - Galleria d'Arte Moderna. Or, again, on 23rd-25th September, hundreds of thousands of young people transformed the city into a stage for any kind of cultural enterprise and into an occasion for discussing the future of the Students' Movement: the huge Convegno internazionale contro la repressione ended with a procession and a show by Dario Fo in Piazza VIII Agosto.
And these were only few of the events that took place in such a brief time-span. The aim of our project is to express such a super-fertile context by investigating some semantic interconnections between people, places, events and concepts somehow related to this subject. The result is what we called BoLo(D) '77: Bologna 1977 in Linked Open Data.

The Items

After a brainstorm activity over our scenario idea, we had to choose the items to work on for our project. A lot of interesting and suitable things came into our minds, both from associative thoughts, prior knowledge and researches: in fact, innumerable items could perfectly express and bear witness to the crucial political and cultural events happened in Bologna during 1977. Finally, we opted for the ten ones that could better illustrate the wide range of items within the LAM domain, as well as those that could offer some variety of metadata standards in their web-based description.
For each item, we provided a brief contextualization and we highlighted its typology together with the cultural institution that that described it.
Finding descriptions and further information related to the Imponderabilia performance (1977) by Marina Abramovic and to the triptych Tre Colonne (1969) by Arnaldo Pomodoro, required further screening activity: that is why we directly contacted some institutions such as Teche Rai and MAMbo (ex-GAM).
For one item, the audio recording of the last broadcast from Radio Alice - 12th March 1977 -, not already described by cultural institutions, we decided to create a formal description from scratch within BoLo(D) '77, due to its strong relevance for the facts of Bologna 1977.

Metadata Analysis

Metadata Alignment

Who - Where - When - What

Theoretical Model

Conceptual Model

The Conceptual Model we drew is a formalization of the previously made Theoretical Model. We typed the edges that constitute our graph i.e. we substituted them with predicates from existing ontologies to express the relationships among our items, places, events and people. We started from our metadata alignement and, when the items were described with standards that are immediately transable in an ontology or that have a strong connection with an existing ontology, we thought it was the most natural choice to adopt these: e.g. Dublin Core for Imponderabilia.
We chose OAD - Ontology for Archival Description and EAC-CPF for archival items; BibFrame and DC were used for our bibliographical items. We also found out that a more precise description of Comic related properties was possible by means of the predicates from a specific ontology i.e. the Comic Book Ontology.
A versatile and yet detailed ontology such as Schema.org was chosen for those items that didn't have an original explicit metadata description i.e. Paz! and Radio Alice's recording. Its predicates were used also for the Inascoltable Music Album: at first glance we thought about the Music Ontology but, after a detailed analysis of the documentation, we thought it was not enough stable, clear nor detailed.
CIDOC-CRM together with FRBRoo were our choice for many properties, especially for those items directly connected to the museum environment or in general for cultural heritage information; this was also due to the fact that they allow the description of cultural objects by different points of observation i.e. at different ontological levels. For example, we completely modelled in CIDOC-CRM/FRBRoo not only the possible core of our Knowledge Domain and Graph BoLo(D) '77, but also Pomodoro's 3 Colonne: we thought it was coherent with the nature of the resource and that it could perfectly express some events related to the troubled history of the sculptures e.g. changes of holdings, locations and moves, their particular techniques of production etc. Even though more recents versions of the two ontologies were available at the time of writing, we decided to use only the officially closed and published editions: v. 7.0.1 for CIDOC-CRM (October 2020) and v. 3.0 for FRBRoo (September 2017).
Due to the centrality of interconnected events for our subject - within a determined time-span -, as well as of collective agents, we decided to explore in depth some specific ontologies. For events, we analysed LODE: An ontology for Linking Open Descriptions of Events and The Event Ontology: we used both of them because, even if Lode was more directly related with the OAD ontology already used for archival documents, the latter includes a really suitable "subEvent" property for illustrating the structure of our theme. 1977 in Bologna was indeed composed of many crucial subevents: we could, though, illustrate single episodes within it e.g. Lorusso's Murder, Radio Alice's closure and the International Meeting of 23rd-25th September. Finally, we also took advantage of ontologies for people, groups, organizations and individual/collective agents, such as FOAF or The Organization Ontology.
As it is shown below, we realized an overall Conceptual Model with formalized predicates for our domain, but also went in depth analysing and modelling a detailed version of each item with classes and properties. Together with the yED - the software we used throughout our workflow for maps creation and modelling - we took advantage of the Graffoo - Graphical Framework for OWL Ontologies palette.

Data Representation and RDF Production

As final part of our workflow, we went back to our data. A table with formalized predicates was produced for each item and, for better usability and practicity, we diplayed these on a specific separate page.

This preliminary step allowed the proper Knowledge Representation of BoLo(D) '77 through RDF production. To serialize our RDF triples we chose Turtle, due to its readability and widespread use in the LOD world.
We minted URIs for our entities by dividing these into items, places, events and agents. For each main group, further categorization was applied in order to name the entities. We followed common approaches in Knowledge Representation and Ontology Creation, trying always to be coherent, consistent and unambiguous.
For practicity, we wrote triples about a sample of our items. We chose, nevertheless, those items that are more transversally interconnected with each other, for some direct or indirect reasons, through places, events or people: i.e. 3 Colonne, Inascoltable, Piazza Maggiore era troppo piccola and the poster Incontro Internazionale contro la repressione.
For referencing, we used the owl:sameAs property with VIAF, WIKIDATA and LCCN - Library of Congress Linked Data Service Authorities for people and items. For places, we linked our entities to GeoNames. For controlled forms of genres, artistic techniques and materials we referred mainly to LCCN controlled forms of names, with some precious integrations offered by WIKIDATA.
In order to create additional semantic relations, we linked items and agents - both people or institutions - to their related Webpages or Wikipedia voices through the predicate foaf:isPrimaryTopicOf, as for making it possible to deepen one's knowledge about a topic or entity. We also deepened into some partitive interconnections when describing Pomodoro's 3 Colonne: we linked Bologna's triad to its twin exemplar in Honolulu (dcterms:relation) and we additionally distinguished, within the landmark, the three single sculptures that constitute it (crm:P46_is_composed_of), each with its specific extent, material and technique.

RDF Visualization

Lastly, we created a visualization of the resulting Knowledge Graph, thanks to the RDF Grapher service.