ARKIVO: an Ontology for Describing Archival Resources Laura Pandolfo 1 , Luca Pulina 1 , and Marek Zieli´ nski 2 1 Dipartimento di Chimica e Farmacia, Universit` a di Sassari, via Vienna 2, 07100 Sassari – Italy, laura.pandolfo@uniss.it, lpulina@uniss.it 2 Pilsudski Institute of America, 138 Greenpoint Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11222 – USA MZielinski@pilsudski.org Abstract. In this paper we present arkivo, an ontology designed to accommodate the archival description of historical document collections. The aim of arkivo is to provide a reference schema for a rich represen- tation of data elements in digital historical archives. This paper briefly reports design and implementation of arkivo, as well as its applica- tion on a real world case study, namely the J´ ozef Pi lsudski Institute of America digitized collections. 1 Context & Motivation Information technologies changed the way of doing archival research. The real change happened in the 1990s, after the advent of the Web, when a great number of historical documents were published online stored in digital archives, by pro- viding the users the possibility to have a direct access to millions of documents in a rapid and easy way. Recently, digital archives are facing new challenges in order to overcome tra- ditional data management and information browsing. In this context, Semantic Web (SW) [1] technologies can improve digital archives by facilitating archival metadata storage and adding semantic capabilities, which increase the quality of the information retrieval process. In particular, ontologies, which are defined as a formal specification of domain knowledge conceptualization [2], play a key role in several aspects, e.g., resources description by means of taxonomies and vo- cabularies in order to promote interoperability and consistency between different sources [3]. In the last decade, there has been a great amount of effort in designing vocabularies and metadata standards to catalogue documents and collections, such as Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FBRB) 1 , MAchine- Readable Cataloging (MARC) 2 , Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS) 3 , and Encoded Archival Description (EAD) 4 , just to cite a few well-known ex- amples. Metadata standards such as FRBR, EAD and MODS seem to be more 1 http://www.cidoc-crm.org/frbroo/ 2 https://www.loc.gov/marc/ 3 http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/ 4 https://www.loc.gov/ead/