Abstract
Iconography and iconology are fundamental domains when it comes to understanding artifacts of cultural heritage (CH). Iconography deals with the study and interpretation of visual elements depicted in artifacts and their symbolism, while iconology delves deeper, exploring the underlying cultural and historical meanings. Despite the advances in representing CH with Linked Open Data (LOD), recent studies show persistent gaps in the representation of iconographic and iconological statements in current knowledge graphs (KGs). To address them, this paper presents IICONGRAPH, a KG that was created by refining and extending the iconographic and iconological statements of ArCo (the Italian KG of CH) and Wikidata. The development of IICONGRAPH was also driven by a series of requirements emerging from research case studies expressed in competency questions (CQs) that were unattainable in the non-reengineered versions of the KGs. The evaluation results demonstrate that IICONGRAPH not only outperforms ArCo and Wikidata through domain-specific assessments from the literature but also serves as a robust platform for answering the formulated CQs. IICONGRAPH is released and documented in accordance with the FAIR principles to guarantee the resource’s reusability. The algorithms used to create it and assess the CQs have also been made available to ensure transparency and reproducibility. While future work focuses on ingesting more data into the KG, and on implementing it as a backbone of LLM-based question answering systems, the current version of IICONGRAPH still emerges as a valuable asset, contributing to the evolving landscape of CH representation within KGs, the Semantic Web, and beyond.
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Notes
- 1.
Iconography is the study and interpretation of visual symbols and images, often within the context of art or visual representation. It involves the identification and analysis of symbols, motifs, and elements within images in an artwork. Iconology instead involves the interpretation of images in a broader cultural and historical context, exploring the deeper layers of meaning, cultural ideologies, and socio-political influences associated with visual representations [17].
- 2.
Considering dumping as the phenomenon in which “important information for which no appropriate field was found, was forced as plain text inside a descriptive field, easy for humans to read but forever lost to any automatic tool” [2].
- 3.
Intended as the set of symbolic meanings that some CH objects (or the elements depicted in them) convey from specific cultural perspectives.
- 4.
In the mentioned study, both KGs performed poorly on the “structure” evaluation, which dealt with the possibility to differentiate between iconographic, iconological, and symbolic subjects, among other criteria explained in Sect. 4.
- 5.
- 6.
Query last run in December 2023: https://qlever.cs.uni-freiburg.de/wikidata/yKhv77.
- 7.
Query last run in December 2023: https://w.wiki/8QyF.
- 8.
Query last run in December: https://w.wiki/6BZR.
- 9.
This decision is supported by the work that presents ICON 2.0 [22], in which ArCo’s descriptions are a use case example for ICON 2.0.
- 10.
- 11.
- 12.
- 13.
In summary, a perfect schema would be able to describe actions, preiconographical elements, stories, allegories, iconographical subjects, symbols, iconological subjects, cultural phenomena, and should be able to be used in combination with a taxonomy or controlled vocabulary of art and culture.
- 14.
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Sartini, B. (2024). IICONGRAPH: Improved Iconographic and Iconological Statements in Knowledge Graphs. In: Meroño Peñuela, A., et al. The Semantic Web. ESWC 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14665. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-60635-9_4
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