Romaria De Nª Srª D'Agonia: Building a Digital Repository and a Virtual Museum

Abstract

Romarias are Christian pilgrimages that occur in order to celebrate a specific saint. Romaria de Nª Srª d'Agonia (RNS Agonia, for short) occurs aimed at celebrating Nossa Senhora da Agonia, patron of all Fishermen, at Viana do Castelo, Portugal. RNS Agonia is a very old event that surely belongs to the Minho’s Cultural Heritage. There are many written documents, of various types, that describe the event; so, their digital preservation is mandatory. However, digital preservation is not restricted to a database of digital images obtained by scanning the documents. In this paper we are concerned with digital repositories of XML-based annotated documents from which we can extract automatically data to build a virtual museum that helps on disseminating information about RNS Agonia. Such a Web resource is crucial to support people wishing to know more about that pilgrimage, and also as a booster for tourism. The paper describes the different stages of this project, including the documents annotation process, data extraction mechanisms, the creation of a triple storage to archive the knowledge built from the sources analyzed, and the virtual museum implementation. The methodological approach devised for the project under discussion is based on the creation of an ontology that describes the RNS Agonia domain completely. The idea is to define the XML dialect, to be used in the annotation, from the ontology. Moreover the ontology will also lead the definition of the triple store used to set up the knowledge base that feeds the museum.