Recent advances in semantic web and deep learning technologies enable new means for the computational analysis of vast amounts of information from the field of digital humanities. We discuss how some of the techniques can be used to identify historical and cultural symmetries between different characters, locations, events or venues, and how these can be harnessed to develop new strategies to promote intercultural and cross-border aspects that support the teaching and learning of history and heritage. The strategies have been put to the test in the context of the European project CrossCult, revealing enormous potential to encourage curiosity to discover new information and increase retention of learned information.

The teaching of History in primary and secondary education often attains low levels of learning and understanding. Building on the success of previous experiences in the area of serious games, we are investigating the potential of situational curiosity and serendipity to increase the retention of historical facts. We present a game designed to explore networks of relationships among the topics of upcoming classes (not necessarily History ones) and topics that may be of interest to their students in a given place and/or on a given date. The design of the game's concept is supported by an intelligent system that uses DBpedia and YAGO as the main sources of knowledge in the search for semantic links among concepts. The teachers are given tools to revise the meshes of concepts and relationships, to modify things and to introduce new relationships.

CrossCult is a newly started project that aims to make reflective history a reality in the European cultural context. In this paper we examine how the project aims to take advantage of advances in semantic technologies in order to achieve its goals. Specifically, we see what the quest for reflection is and, through practical examples from two of the project’s flagship pilots, explain how semantics can assist in this direction.