The /DH.arc Vocabularies repository provides access to semantic artefacts, such as controlled vocabularies and ontologies, created by the Digital Humanities Advanced Research Centre at the University of Bologna. Semantic artefacts, defined as “machine-actionable formalization (represented using appropriate formats and serializations, including RDF and non-RDF standards) of a conceptualization, enabling sharing and reuse by humans and machines” (Corcho et al., 2024), hold a special importance as products of research in that they are both key to achieving FAIR-ness in the data being produced and are themselves research objects that should be FAIR (Cox et al., 2021), yet the latter is often less considered than the former (Poveda-Villalón et al., 2020). As such, the primary goal of the repository is to make it easier for semantic artefacts produced by /DH.arc to be FAIR and thus more accessible and visible both within and outside of research communities.

The repository runs on Skosmos, a web based open-source ontology browser developed and released by the team at the National Library of Finland, which uses SKOS as the underlying data model.

One notable difference with other existing Skosmos installations is that this repository makes ontologies originally written in OWL available by overlaying OWL and SKOS, based on a 2008 W3C recommentation and subsequent paper (see Jupp et al., 2008). Please see "/DH.arc Vocabularies: Making semantic artefacts more visible and accessible using SKOS" which was presented at the 2025 AIUCD conference as a paper and at the 2025 Workshop on Open Citations and Open Scholarly Metadata as a poster for more details on how we create SKOS versions of OWL ontologies as well as the overall workflow and publication processes.

All files in this repository can be easily browsed (desktop only, mobile not supported) using a visualisation of the concept hierarchies or alphabetical index as well as downloaded in RDF formats. The search interface enables users to search terms in specific vocabularies or all available. Lastly, there is also a REST API with full documentation to access all the data in /DH.arc Vocabularies.

You can view the latest build of the repository on our GitHub.

Issues can be raised via GitHub and any inquiries and suggestions can be sent to dharc@live.unibo.it.

References:
Cox, S. J. D., Gonzalez-Beltran, A. N., Magagna, B., & Marinescu, M.-C. (2021). Ten simple rules for making a vocabulary FAIR. PLoS Computational Biology, 17(6), e1009041. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009041.
Poveda-Villalón, M., Espinoza-Arias, P., Garijo, D., & Corcho, O. (2020). Coming to terms with FAIR ontologies. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science (pp. 255–270). Springer International Publishing.
Jupp, S., Bechhofer, S., & Stevens, R. (2008). SKOS with OWL: Don’t be Full-ish! https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-432/owled2008eu_submission_22.pdf.