Silvia-Adriana Tomescu (The National University of Political Studies and Public Administration, Romania)
Our research explores the intersection between historical bibliography and semantic modeling, focusing on early Romanian printed books from the 16th and 17th centuries. It proposes a cultural ontology that views memory as a dynamic network of agents, texts, institutions, and meanings rather than a static repository.
The first section reconstructs the key printing hubs in Wallachia, Moldavia, and Transylvania, starting with Macarie’s liturgical writings in Târgoviște (1508-1512) and ending with Simion Ștefan’s New Testament of Bălgrad (1699). Political and religious sponsorship, linguistic layers (Slavonic, Romanian, Greek), and international book circulation across monastic and scholarly networks are all discussed in context. The second part introduces a hybrid ontological framework combining CIDOC CRM, LRMoo, Dublin Core, and FOAF to semantically structure relationships such as authorship, printing places, institutional custody, and cultural expression. The model is represented through an interactive visualization using Leaflet and JSON-LD, enabling users to explore memory pathways as semantic maps. By representing the old printed book as a nodal point within a living knowledge ecosystem, the research proposes a shift from descriptive metadata to a relational epistemology — one in which ontology functions as a grammar of cultural memory. The research offers a scalable framework for integrating bibliographic heritage into the semantic web while also advancing methodological dialogue between historical bibliography, ontological modeling, and digital scholarship.