A Semantic and Service-Oriented Platform for Integrating Multi-Source Archival Data: The Case of the Rivista Storica Italiana Archive

Modern digital-humanities projects increasingly require platforms that can integrate heterogeneous archival sources, preserve provenance, and support complex research queries across evolving corpora. This paper proposes a semantic and service-oriented platform designed to ingest archival items with provenance tracking; normalize descriptive metadata; build a Knowledge Graph (KG) that models journals, issues, editorial events, persons and institutions; and expose the resulting corpus through RESTful APIs, faceted search and graph exploration. The system relies on standard Web and Semantic Web technologies (JSON-LD, RDF, OWL, SPARQL) and integrates a Natural Language Processing (NLP) component for semi-automatic enrichment of Italian historical texts. A prototype built with open-source tools shows that it is possible to support complex historian queries in interactive time while preserving long-term semantic interoperability with other cultural-heritage initiatives, fully aligning with the principles of the Digital Humanities.