• semantic web
• wiki
• document oriented database
• linked open data
• ontology
• historical archive
• architecture

Private historical archives are a significant part of the Italian documentary heritage. They are safeguarded by state bodies and included in the national archival point of access, but still rarely digitised and made available as Linked Open Data sets. At a time when we all need to have remote access to the sources, and the Digital Humanities scholarship is growing, missing data from the private archives contributes to a lack of diversity and excludes people and subjects from the research, in the same way as the traditional approach used to do.
This thesis reports on the project of semantic description and publication of the personal papers of Italian architect and engineer Dino Tamburini (1924-2011), an important figure in the post-WWII reconstruction of Trieste. We describe the steps taken for the creation of the digital archive: archival arrangement, design of data model, annotation, and the publishing. The thesis challenges the assumption that semantic technologies are inaccessible for small archives. We adopt an agile methodology to develop the ontology, incrementally produce data, and use a document-oriented non-linear environment, TiddlyWiki, to design the web representation of the archive. The resulting prototype follows the strict requirements of archival science, but at the same time, produces a captivating representation of the archive, combining structured data and free-form narratives.