Biography

Paolo Bonora graduated in Performing Arts from the University of Bologna and received his Master’s degree in Digital Humanities from the University of Florence. From 2016 to 2020, he attended the doctoral program in Cultural Heritage Studies at the University of Bologna where he wrote his dissertation on the adoption of Semantic Web technologies and Linked Data principles to manage historical information about opera. Since 2005, he has collaborated with the Corago project, the Italian Melodramma Digital Archive, supporting conceptual modelling and software development. He is currently based at the Department of Classical Philology and Italian Studies at University of Bologna.

Project Summary

The project aims to publish the “Repertorio della Poesia Italiana in Musica, 1500-1700” (RePIM) as Linked Open Data (LOD) dataset. The RePIM is a reference repertoire for research on Italian secular music from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The current content of the repository is: a bibliography of literary sources of 1,500 titles; the incipit of over 66,000 musical compositions; a bibliography of circa 3,500 musical sources of secular and spiritual music; an authority file with circa 1,400 musicians and 3,200 poets; and digital reproductions of about 50% of the musical sources. The RePIM, edited by Lorenzo Bianconi, Antonio Vassalli and Angelo Pompilio at the University of Bologna since late 1970s, was conceived as a tool to support scholars in identifying authors of poetic writings used by musicians in the profane and spiritual vocal production of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries centuries. The project will migrate contents to RDF (Resource Description Format) using reference ontologies such as the Library Reference Model and the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model. The result will be a knowledge base relying on a set of open and well-established formal ontologies and then fully interoperable within the Linked Data ecosystem.