Towards an ontology for describing archival resources

Several digital libraries and archives are emerging around the world due to the need to store, organize and make available on the Web a lot of resource collections. However, managing this information poses new challenges in order to overcome traditional data management and information browsing. Semantic Web technologies can improve digital libraries and archives by facilitating metadata storage and adding semantic capabilities, which increase the quality of the information retrieval process. In this paper we present ARKIVO, an ontology designed to model the archival description of historical document collections.