ResearchinHumanitiesandSocialSciencesistraditionallybasedonprintedpublicationssuchasmanuscripts, personal correspondence, first editions and other types of documents which are often difficult to obtain. An important step to facilitate humanities and social sciences scholarship is to make digital reproductions of these materials freely available on-line. The collection of resources available on-line is continuously expanding. It is now required to develop tools to access these resources in an intelligent way and search them as if they were part of a unique information space. In this paper we present Talia, a innovative distributed semantic digital library, annotation and publishing system, which is specifically designed for the needs of scholarly research in humanities. Talia is strictly based on standard Semantic Web technologies and uses ontologies for the organization of knowledge, which can help the definition of a highly adaptable and state-of-the-art research and publishing envir...