Semantic framework for complex knowledge domains

Large amounts of scientific digital contents, potentially available for public sharing and reuse, are nowadays held by scientific and cultural institutions which institutionally collect, produce and store information valuable for dissemination, work, study and research. Semantic technology offers to these stakeholders the possibility to integrate dispersed heterogeneous yet related resources and to build value-added sharing services (overcoming barriers such as e.g. knowledge domain complexity, different classification, language, data format, localization) by exploiting semantic annotation and building virtual content aggregation schemas on top of distributed collections. Applications in real cases are anyway often hampered by difficulties related to the proper formalization of complex scientific knowledge (ontology engineering) and the classification of contents (semantic annotation). This paper illustrates the lessons learnt in applying the Semantic Web specifications to support content management and sharing in complex knowledge domains and provides practical example of application in an EC-funded project.