An Ontology and a Collaborative Knowledge Base for History of Computing

In recent years, the history of automatic computing devices and as-sociated technologies has attracted more and more interest. The areais quite peculiar, very complex, very young, and involves rapid ob-solescence. So, research practices and tools for handling it from a cul-tural heritage perspective are still immature. Still missing, and urgentlyneeded, is an ontology that categorizes and systematizes the conceptsof interest. Also, there is a pressing need to collect, preserve and makeavailable precious knowledge that is at risk of going lost. It is currentlyscattered across many people spread all over the world.As a contribution to this area of research, this paper proposes: an on-tology for computing devices and their history, the first version of aknowledge graph for this field, and GraphBRAIN, a general-purposetool to design and collaboratively populate knowledge graphs, that alsoprovides advanced consultation and analysis tools. It may be used as anintermediate layer to provide services to end-user applications aimed atpersonalized fruition of cultural heritage, also in a touristic perspective.