The OntoPavese ontology aims to represent Cesare Pavese’s works in both breadth and depth, organizing the available knowledge into a rigorous semantic hierarchy. It encompasses all of Pavese’s published works—both poetry and prose—as well as private documents such as his letters and diary.

The description goes beyond editorial information, enriching it with data about the different versions each text underwent in Pavese’s creative process, and about the composition of the archival witnesses, down to the level of the individual page.

This creates a coherent network of bibliographic, philological, and archival information, aligned on the one hand with the LRM (Library Reference Model) of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions and its corresponding formal ontology, LRMoo, now incorporated into CIDOC-CRM; and on the other hand with the RiC (Records in Context) model developed by the International Council on Archives, and its ontology RiC-O.

All semantic data is further enriched through linking to LOD (Linked Open Data) repositories and authority files such as Geonames and VIAF.

OntoPavese has been semi-automatically populated using data drawn from secondary literature, bibliographic catalogues, archival holdings, and the XML/TEI files produced by the PaveseInTesto, which gathers all the digital scholarly editions of Pavese’s works. It currently includes approximately 30,000 distinct ontological entities.

OntoPavese, constantly being updated but already freely available for download in OWL format, can be queried from individual work pages where it is integrated, through predefined query forms, or via a SPARQL endpoint.
Interactive visual exploration of the ontology’s defined relationships is made possible through the Pavese Path Explorer, a tool developed within the project for this specific purpose.

 The documentation (coming soon) has been generated using LODE (Live OWL Documentation Environment).